About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 13. Moral Development

Abstract

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Parental burnout, i.e., a chronic condition resulting from high levels of parenting-related stress (Griffith, 2020; Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2018), can pose a challenge to the parent-child relationship and have severe consequences for children, including as manifested through children's behavioral problems (Goodman, 2007). Yet not all children respond similarly to parental effects. One child characteristic that can impact how children perceive and respond to their parent's distress is empathy. Empathy is a socio-emotional, other-oriented emotional response that is induced by the perception of another individual’s affective state (Roth-Hanania et al., 2011). Differences in empathic response tendencies have implications for individuals' social functioning and well-being. Empathy includes both cognitive (i.e., accurately understanding others' emotional states) and emotional aspects (i.e., sharing in the other's emotional response) which can often be differentially associated with these outcomes (Davis, 1996; Davidov et al., 2020; Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009). While much research supports positive outcomes related to higher empathy, some studies suggest that when parents experience distress higher empathy may lead to negative child outcomes, acting as a risky strength. Following this, the current study aimed to examine how children's empathic tendencies may moderate the relationship between parenting stress and children's behavior problems. To address this, we used data from the fourth and fifth time points of a longitudinal study on empathy development that commenced when children were 10-18 months old. Participants were N=120 typically developing, 42-51 months old children and their mothers. Here, we analyze mothers' reports regarding parental burnout, child's empathy, and child's behavioral problems.
We found that the relationship between parental burnout and child's internalizing symptoms is moderated by child affective empathy, such that the association between parental burnout and internalizing symptoms becomes stronger when affective empathy increases from low (β=0.09, SE=0.13 p=0.47), to medium (β=0.27, SE=0.08 p=0.00) to high (β=0.45, SE=0.11 p=0.00). Externalizing symptoms were predicted only by cognitive empathy (β=0.18, SE=0.09 p=0.042). Our findings suggest that children who experience the emotions of others more intensely may also internalize the mother's distress, thus placing them at a higher risk of developing behavioral problems.

Author information

Author	Role
Tamar Kadosh-Laor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Presenting author
Liat Moyal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Non-presenting author
Liat Israeli-Ran, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Non-presenting author
Florina Uzefovsky, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Non-presenting author

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