Timing and parenting

Today, we’re looking at two very different studies related to timing. First, Blanchard, Kerr, Kirkorian, Barr, Hoebeke & Heeren (2025) published “The Affective Dynamics of Parenting: Inertia of emotional distance characterizes severe parental burnout” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the edited abstract:

Our emotional trajectories make up our affective experience—but these can be disrupted during mental illness. This study focuses on affect anchored to the parenting context (i.e., daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up) to assess whether the way parenting affect fluctuates relates to dysfunction: parental burnout severity. We focus on three specific patterns (i.e., affective dynamic indices): inertia (i.e., persistence across days), variation (i.e., magnitude of change), and covariation (i.e., whether affect variables fluctuate together). We reanalyzed multiple data sets (from Belgium and the United States) yielding 180 parents who had rated their parenting affect daily for either 3 or 8 weeks. We computed a regression model with all affective indices as predictors (controlling for mean levels), with parental burnout severity as the outcome variable. Results indicate that inertia of emotional distance predicts parental burnout severity across most sensitivity models (i.e., even with varied operationalizations of affective indices). No other temporal pattern (i.e., variation or covariation) robustly predicted parental burnout severity, although the mean levels of emotional distance and emotional exhaustion did. Results from sensitivity analyses emphasize that operationalization choices for affective indices can yield varying values and impact results. 

I like the study of trajectories and parental burnout certainly merits attention. I was drawn to this study because of the concept of inertia of emotional distance. It makes sense to me that persistent emotional distance feeds burnout more than variation or covariation. Emotional distance and emotional exhaustion predict parental burnout. The next study looks at parent-teen relationships. Bülow, Boele, Lougheed, Denissen, van Roekel & Keijsers (2025) published “A Matter of Timing? Effects of parent–adolescent conflict on adolescent negative affect and depressive symptoms on six timescales” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.

Development is an iterative dynamic process that unfolds over time. Few theories, however, discuss the speed of developmental processes. Therefore, decisions about measurement timing often rely on arbitrary or practical choices, disregarding the timescale dependency of the results. As an exemplary case, this preregistered study assessed reciprocal associations between parent–adolescent conflict and ill-being (i.e., negative affect and depressive symptoms) with daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly, and three-monthly intervals. A 100-day diary study (N = 159, M = 13.31 years, 62% girls, 89% Dutch, data collection: 2020–2021) and a 26-wave biweekly study (N = 253, M = 14.37 years, 72% girls, 96% Dutch, data collection: 2019–2020) were used. By aggregating measurements, multiple timescales could be assessed within the same data set. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that conflict predicted depressive symptoms 1 month (β = .09) and 3 months later (β = .13). Reversely, negative affect predicted conflict 1 week later (β = .07) and depressive symptoms predicted conflict 2 weeks later (β = .08). Thus, transactional processes may function differently at different timescales, which has implications for expanding developmental theories about the timescales of relevant processes.

This study examines how the relationship between parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent negative affect and depressive symptoms changes over different time periods. It finds that conflicts affect adolescents’ depressive symptoms over months, while adolescents’ negative affect and depressive symptoms influences conflicts over weeks, highlighting the importance of considering time when studying developmental processes.

According to dynamic systems theory (e.g., Smith & Thelen, 2003) and ecological theories of development (e.g., Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), interactions in real time may coalesce into long-term developmental change. In order to be an effective driving force of development, these everyday interactions with their environment must occur “on a fairly regular basis over extended periods of time” (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006, p. 797). For example, according to this theoretical framework, not one single conflict with parents but rather a recurring pattern of conflicts could result in developmental change of depressive symptoms (Chiang et al., 2023; Laursen & Hafen, 2010). Still, the time needed to see these processes unfold is never explicitly specified. In parenting research, there are well-known examples where short- and longer-term effects of parenting upon child outcomes can be opposing. For example, giving in to a crying toddler who desperately demands candy will probably stop the child’s misbehavior in the short run but reinforce such behaviors in the long run, leading to more tantrums. Such patterns, in which the faster and slower processes differ from each other, might be omnipresent in developmental processes but are hardly studied. Adolescence is a sensitive period for the development of ill-being (Solmi et al., 2022). We define ill-being, which encompasses negative emotions and mental disorders like depression, as the opposite of well-being, (Zhao & Tay, 2023). Parent–adolescent conflict (i.e., quarreling and disagreements) is one risk factor for ill-being as it interferes with the fundamental need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). 

This preregistered study was the first to systematically examine the transactional effects of parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent ill-being on six different timescales. While adolescent ill-being predicted parent–adolescent conflict on a (bi)weekly timescale, conflict predicted ill-being on a (three-)monthly timescale. Therefore, these meso-timescales, which where hitherto not empirically studied, and multiple timescale studies might be a potentially fruitful starting point for investigating parenting effects. This study also serves as a cautionary example, illustrating how results are contingent upon the timescale of investigation. In sum, in order to understand developmental dynamics, it is about time to assess developmental processes on the timescales on which they unfold.

I am a fan of dynamic systems theory and was intrigued by the idea of examining different time scales. The results are not surprising but the finding that conflict and ill-being have different impacts is important. The much longer term impact of conflict makes asking questions about it as important as asking parents about emotional distance and burnout.