Latino children and youth from low-income backgrounds express more stress, depression, anxiety, and delinquency than white, European American children and youth. Children must learn strategies to deal with and cope with stress in their lives. Parents play an essential role in children's lives and in their ability to help their children deal with stressful situations. There is a need for programs that focus on Latino parents to help parents find ways that they can help their children cope with stress. A multi-site randomized controlled trial with pre, post, and 3-month follow-up assessments was conducted to evaluate the impact of a program to help Latina mothers help their children cope with stress. Mothers in the intervention group participated in a seven-week program to learn to help their children cope with stress and deal with difficult situations. The program focused on assisting mothers to learn appropriate strategies to manage controllable and uncontrollable stressors, to recognize when children are stressed, to coach their children on coping, to understand difficult emotions, and to improve communication with their children. MANCOVAs were used to examine the impact of the program on: 1) mothers' emotion coaching, parental self-efficacy, coping knowledge, and scaffolding of their children's responses to stress; and 2) children's coping with difficult situations and behavior problems. Mothers in the intervention group, compared to the controls, showed significant increases from pre-test to post-test in emotion coaching, in their knowledge of strategies to help their children cope, in maternal scaffolding strategies to effectively support child coping, and in their self-efficacy regarding helping their children cope with stress. Intervention mothers also showed significant decreases in their ratings of children's behavior problems. Children whose mothers had taken the program reported less emotional problems and increased their use of primary control engagement in one of two situations studied. The findings show that the program had an impact on mother's ability to help their children cope with stressful situations and to empower them to have more communication about feelings with their children. Latina mothers can greatly benefit from evidence-based programs that help them learn strategies to improve their children's socioemotional development.

Latino youth are exposed to a number of stressors that can overwhelm their coping abilities. Learning and strengthening coping skills from an early age is thus critical for this population. Parents play a significant role in their children's coping; consequently, culturally appropriate programs that help Latino parents help their children cope with stress are needed. A multi-site randomized controlled trial (RCT) with pre- and post-assessments was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a program to help Latina mothers help their children cope with stress. Mothers in the intervention condition participated in a seven-week program that focused on improving mothers' abilities to help their children cope, teaching mothers positive scaffolding techniques to help their children manage stressful situations, and enhancing emotion coaching skills. Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicated that there were significant increases in mothers' self-efficacy in helping their children cope with stress, in the number of strategies mothers generated to help their children cope, and in developing more positive scaffolding behaviors as well as having improved emotion coaching abilities from pre- to post-test. These findings imply that Latina mothers are receptive to and benefit from culturally sensitive parenting programs that focus on improving their skills so that they can better assist their children in coping with stress. This population can greatly benefit from evidence-based programs such as the one in this study that empower parents to take an active role in ensuring their children's healthy socioemotional development.

All parents experience stress as they attempt to meet the challenges of caring for their children. This comprehensive book examines the causes and consequences of parenting distress, drawing on a wide array of findings in current empirical research. Kirby Deater-Deckard explores normal and pathological parenting stress, the influences of parents on their children as well as children on their parents, and the effects of biological and environmental factors. Beginning with an overview of theories of stress and coping, Deater-Deckard goes on to describe how parenting stress is linked with problems in adult and child health (emotional problems, developmental disorders, illness); parental behaviors (warmth, harsh discipline); and factors outside the family (marital quality, work roles, cultural influences). The book concludes with a useful review of coping strategies and interventions that have been demonstrated to alleviate parenting stress.

Learning to cope with stress is one of the most important tasks of childhood. Middle childhood (ages 6 to 12) is a period when youth develop valuable coping skills. Although school-based child coping programs exist, the programs cannot provide tailored instruction to meet individual needs and are taught in a context removed from many of the stresses that children experience. Parents can help bridge these gaps by learning to guide or scaffold their children's coping development. Few culturally sensitive programs are available for at-risk populations such as low-income Latino families. The current study used a holistic approach to examine the effects of a parenting education program designed to teach low-income Latina mothers how to help their children cope with stress and to identify program improvements to guide future program implementation. Seventeen mothers with children between the ages of 9 to 12 years old participated in a 7-week long pilot program. The results revealed that mothers were engaged, mothers utilized the program strategies, and mothers reported that their children were noticing changes in their behavior. Quantitative analyses showed that after participation in the program, mothers increased their use of positive scaffolding behaviors, decreased negative scaffolding behaviors, increased emotion coaching behaviors, and increased in some coping knowledge. Surprisingly, the program increased emotion dismissing behavior and maternal inconsistency significantly, whereas maternal nurturance and organization showed no significant differences. Results of the qualitative and quantitative analyses informed 29 recommendations to improve the program for implementation on a larger scale.

This volume offers an accessible synthesis of research, theories, and perspectives on the family processes that contribute to development.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.