Parental Empathy in Childhood Predicts Stress Reactivity at the Transition to Adulthood: Moderation By Gender

Background:In order to understand how risk relates to negative outcomes for vulnerable children, social workers need to understand the relationships between difficult environments, parenting, and biological mechanisms that have long lasting impacts on functioning.  Stress reactivity is one of these mechanisms, and both heightened and blunted responses are associated with risk for poor outcomes.  Warm and responsive parenting predicts stress reactivity prospectively, which may account for its influence on developmental outcomes.  However, it remains unclear if this prospective association represents a persistent effect with an early onset, or if earlier parenting predicts differences in stress that emerge later in development after accounting for initial stress reactivity.  Moreover, it is unclear if this association is moderated by gender and the experience of maltreatment.   

Methods: Data are from a four wave longitudinal study of the effects of maltreatment on development, from age 9-12 through the transition to adulthood.  Analyses focused on a subsample with complete data for key variables, randomly removing siblings so parents are represented only once in the sample (n = 237).  The sample was 51.9% female, 40.5% African-American, 37.1% Latino, and primarily of low socioeconomic status.   60.8% (n= 144) of participants had a substantiated referral for maltreatment.

Parenting was measured at Time 1 with the Parental Lack of Empathy for Child’s Needs subscale of the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory-2.   Stress reactivity was measured with the Trier Social Stress Test for Children (TSST-C).  Cortisol, was measured in saliva at 5 times points. The area under the curve compared to baseline (AUC-I) was the summary index of stress reactivity.   Analyses focused on the association between parenting at Time 1 and cortisol reactivity at Time 4, while controlling for reactivity at Time 1, to determine if the association continued to emerge throughout development.  Moderation was tested using two-way interactions between parenting and both gender and maltreatment group.                                

Results:   A lack of parental empathy at Time 1 was associated with less cortisol reactivity at Time 4 (β = -.13, p = .048), after accounting for maltreatment and cortisol reactivity at Time 1.  This association was moderated by gender (β = -.19, p = .03) but not maltreatment status (β = -.06, p = .62), and was independent of race/ethnicity, caretaker type, and education.  Analyses stratified by gender indicated that this interaction is accounted for by a negative association between a lack of parental empathy and reactivity in girls (β = -.28, p = .003), but no association in boys (β = .01, p= .89), indicating that less empathy is associated with lower, or blunted stress reactivity in girls.  

Conclusions:  A lack of parental empathy in childhood predicted a smaller, more blunted stress response at the transition to adulthood, after accounting for early stress reactivity.  This suggests the association between early parenting and stress reactivity emerges across development and is long-lasting, potentially accounting for differences in health and mental health. Effects were much stronger for girls than boys, suggesting that stress-related mechanisms linking parenting to healthy development may be gender specific.