Child maltreatment is a significant public health issue. Reducing prevalence of coercive parenting is one means to reducing risk of maltreatment and negative developmental outcomes for children. Parental use of physical punishment has been associated with adverse consequences in childhood and adulthood. Parent education programs, such as the Positive Parenting Program (Triple P), that promote alternatives to using physical punishment with children may reduce coercive parenting. In this study, parental use of physical punishment, non-physical forms of punishment, and non-punitive parenting responses were compared before and after parents attended Level 2 Triple P parent education seminars. International Parenting Survey-Canada (IPS-C) data were used to examine Belsky’s (1984) theoretical proposition that parental factors are the strongest predictor of parenting behaviour followed by contextual and child factors. Independent samples t-tests, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests, and a series of regression models were used to examine the study’s hypotheses. A total of 27 parents attended the Triple P sessions. Parental use of physical punishment decreased on only one of the four physical punishment items (shaking) post- intervention. Although there were no significant differences in overall use of non-physical forms of punishment and non-punitive parenting strategies pre and post-intervention, there were significant increases in frequency of use of individual scale items pre- to post-intervention. IPS-C sample of 2,340 Canadian parents was used to examine Belsky’s postulate. Results were mixed and provided partial support for the postulate. Child behaviour problems, participation in parent education programs, parent employment status, and parent age predicted coercive parenting. Findings highlight the need to further examine these hypotheses. / October 2016

Predicated on the literature, parenting practices are subject to change following high-impact events. This understandably applies to the COVID-19 pandemic, a calamity of sheer magnitude. Despite the presence of maladaptive parenting behaviors in the pandemic, upsides (e.g., compassionate parenting practices, strengthened child-parent bond) did transpire as well. The present study is focused on whether and how parental betterment occurred and unfolded during the pandemic. The explicit research goal is to elucidate what positive parental responses and changes were and what drove those responses and changes. The study employed the phenomenological study to make a fine-grained inquiry into the researched phenomenon. Fourteen parents of varying demographic characteristics constituted the sample. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted over Zoom for data collection. Thematic analysis was performed to code the data. I eventually constructed four themes: (1) targeted parental responses and changes, (2) refined parenting skills and practices, (3) heightened understanding of children and parenting, and (4) unsettled parenting styles. Each theme reflects a critical facet of the parenting experiences during the pandemic. In the discussion, effort is invested in parsing out what could elevate the quality of parental responses and what may contribute to the positive parental changes, as well as in pointing out implications for parents, community stakeholders, and family science scholars. It is of centrality to validate and invigorate parents to hold onto the gains from the COVID-19 pandemic to face the growing precarity in today's economic and sociopolitical milieus.

Parental responses to their children are crucially influenced by stress. However, brain-based mechanistic understanding of the adverse effects of parenting stress and benefits of therapeutic interventions is lacking. We studied maternal brain responses to salient child signals as a function of Mom Power (MP), an attachment-based parenting intervention established to decrease maternal distress. Twenty-nine mothers underwent two functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans during a baby-cry task designed to solicit maternal responses to child's or self's distress signals. Between scans, mothers were pseudorandomly assigned to either MP (n = 14) or control (n = 15) with groups balanced for depression. Compared to control, MP decreased parenting stress and increased child-focused responses in social brain areas highlighted by the precuneus and its functional connectivity with subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, which are key components of reflective self-awareness and decision-making neurocircuitry. Furthermore, over 13 weeks, reduction in parenting stress was related to increasing child- versus self-focused baby-cry responses in amygdala–temporal pole functional connectivity, which may mediate maternal ability to take her child's perspective. Although replication in larger samples is needed, the results of this first parental-brain intervention study demonstrate robust stress-related brain circuits for maternal care that can be modulated by psychotherapy.