Maternal Aggressive Behavior in Interactions With Teens

Today I summarize an article that I found helpful. Sheeber et al. (2023) published “Maternal Aggressive Behavior in Interactions with Adolescent Offspring: Proximal social–cognitive predictors in depressed and nondepressed mothers” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Here’s the highly edited article:

Maternal depressive symptoms are associated with elevations in harsh parenting behavior, including criticism, negative affect, and hostile or coercive behavior, and these behaviors contribute to associations between maternal depressive  

symptomatology and child functioning. Mothers in the depressed group were more likely to initiate aggressive behavior and, once initiated, were less likely to transition out of it. Mothers in both groups were less likely to transition out of aggressive behavior when they made negative attributions for their adolescents’ behavior. 

Maternal depressive symptoms and disorders are associated with elevations in harsh parenting behavior, including criticism, negative affect, hostility, and coercion. These patterns are consistent with evidence that irritability is a common feature of depressive conditions in adults. These parenting behaviors contribute to associations between maternal depressive symptomatology and offspring behavioral, affective, and interpersonal functioning as well as psychopathology. Despite the role of harsh parenting in child and adolescent development and risk for psychopathology, few studies have investigated proximal predictors of individual differences in parenting, either in general or in relation to parenting by depressed parents. 

Parents’ attributions for child behavior denote how they make sense of children’s actions, and as such, are expected to influence their responses. Researchers broadly categorize attributions as “negative,” reflecting child-blaming explanations, or “positive,” reflecting child-crediting explanations. Attributing blame to child or adolescent characteristics, particularly those controllable and stable, is associated with greater harsh and punitive parenting behavior. Mothers suffering from depression may be particularly susceptible to negative attributions, as research on cognitive models of depression shows that depressed persons are prone to negative attributional styles. Mothers experiencing depressive symptoms make more negative attributions for child behavior and these attributions relate to negative parenting behavior with young children and adolescent depressive symptoms. 

Less research has examined how parents process child affective behavior or the relation of these processes to parenting behavior. In particular, depressed persons misperceive positive and neutral affects as negative and overperceive anger. Moreover, persons prone to aggressive behavior overperceive anger in others. This raises the possibility that depressed persons’ tendencies to perceive interpersonal cues as angry or aggressive may contribute to greater harsh or aggressive behavior in mothers with depressive conditions. 

This investigation has several strengths. First, most research on parenting behavior of women with depressive symptoms and disorder, and in particular, research on parental social–cognitive processes, has been conducted with mothers of young children. This is notable given that adolescence is a critical period for the emergence of mental health problems. Second, we focus on a socioeconomically disadvantaged sample. Economic disadvantage is associated with more aggressive parenting behavior, potentially mediating associations between disadvantage and youth mental health outcomes. Third, video-mediated recall (VMR) provides indices of maternal affect labeling and attributions for adolescent behavior in a personally relevant context. Finally, we used multilevel survival analysis (MSA) to examine the proximal predictors of maternal aggressive behavior. 

Participants were 180 low-income women and their adolescent children, ages 11–14 (M = 12.93; 96 assigned male sex at birth). Of the adolescents, 177 identified as cis gender with one assigned female and two assigned males, identifying as nonbinary. Mothers met criteria for one of two groups: (a) a depressed group, with elevated depressive symptoms on the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8; Kroenke et al., 2009) and a history of treatment for depression, and (b) a nondepressed group, selected for no or low levels of current depressive symptomatology, no history of depression treatment, and no current (i.e., past month) mental health treatment for any disorder. 

At the broadest level, findings revealed significant variability in the extent to which mothers were likely to transition into and out of aggressive behavior. “High risk” mothers (i.e., those more likely to transition into and less likely to transition out of aggressive behavior) were more than twice as likely to initiate aggressive behavior and almost 50% less likely to transition out of aggressive behavior than the “average or prototypical” mother. Moreover, the study revealed factors associated with these maternal transitions into and out of aggressive behavior.

As expected, depressed mothers demonstrated more harsh interactional behavior than did nondepressed mothers. In the current study, mothers in the depressed group were both more likely to initiate aggressive behavior and, once initiated, less likely to transition out of it. These results add to existing evidence showing greater harsh parenting in depressed women relative to nondepressed women, indicating that differences emerge both in initiation and termination of aggressive behavior, identifying entry points for interventions targeting aggressive parenting. Moreover, as research on maternal depression has often failed to adequately address confounding stressors that differ between depressed and nondepressed women, it is notable that these differences emerged in a sample in which all families experienced economic stress.

Results also indicated that maternal perception of adolescent aggressive behavior did not predict onset of maternal aggressive behavior, although the estimate of this effect almost reached the conventional level of statistical significance. Thus, although we are being conservative in not interpreting this effect as significant, it may be worth reexamining in future studies in order to obtain independent estimates of this effect—especially in studies with greater statistical power. 

Contrary to hypotheses, there was no main effect of maternal negative attributions on the likelihood of transitioning into aggressive behavior. Notably, this effect was modified by a three-way interaction in which nondepressed women were more likely to transition into aggressive behavior, given negative attributions, if their adolescent child was male. As this effect was not anticipated, and is somewhat counterintuitive, we are hesitant to offer much in the way of post hoc speculations, pending replication. With regard to the offset of aggressive behaviors, two predictors emerged in addition to maternal depressive status. First, across groups, mothers were less likely to transition out of aggressive behavior when they made negative attributions for their children’s behavior. Second, observed indices of adolescent aggressive behavior were associated with reduced likelihood of shifting out of aggressive behavior, for depressed mothers only.

The finding that negative attributions predicted mothers’ failure to transition out of aggressive behavior is consistent with findings that child-blaming attributions associate with harsh parenting, builds on the developing literature that maternal attributional processes are relevant to interactional quality during adolescence, and highlights the role of attributional processes in maintaining harsh parenting, once initiated. 

That observed adolescent aggressive behavior was associated with reduced likelihood of mothers transitioning out of aggressive behavior for depressed mothers is in some ways unsurprising given that interpersonal provocation is a common precipitant of angry behavior, in general and within families. It is interesting, however, that this association was specific to dyads with depressed mothers. This finding is consistent with evidence that persons prone to angry behavior, as are depressed individuals, are more attentive to anger-relevant stimuli, and with our own prior findings indicating greater convergence of anger during interactions in families with depressed- than nondepressed adolescents. The finding that adolescent aggressive behavior reduced the likelihood of depressed mothers transitioning out of aggressive behavior is particularly significant from a clinical perspective given evidence that mothers often need to take the lead in transitioning out conflictual interactions with their teenagers, given teenager’s propensity to perpetuate negative interactions.

Subsequent research should determine the extent to which findings replicate in more diverse samples. In this regard, we note that we did not examine the potential of racial or ethnic bias in ratings of aggressiveness in this study. This issue may be important to consider in studies benefitting from more diverse samples. Another limitation is the relatively narrow context within which parenting behavior was examined. Parenting occurs in a broad range of interpersonal contexts, and it will be important, therefore, to examine whether predictors of aggressive parenting behavior depend on the nature of the interaction. Finally, with regard to maternal attributions, it should be noted that there is no way to determine whether attributions made during the VMR reflected thoughts during the interactional context or emerged during viewing of the video.

Depressed women were more likely to transition into, and less likely to transition out of, aggressive behavior relative to nondepressed women. Women who made negative attributions for child behavior were less likely to transition out of aggressive behavior. Delayed offset was also predicted by observed adolescent aggressive behavior, but only in dyads of depressed women. These findings indicate that maternal social–cognitive processes relate to harsh parenting during conflict interactions.

I think this study is helpful in understanding the complex interactions between depressed mothers and their teenaged children. It also helps by identifying the circular relationships between mothers and teens that lead to the increased likelihood of maternal aggressive behavior and the failure of mothers to transition out of aggressive behavior.