Parenting Practices and Emotion Regulation in National Guard and Reserve Families: Early Findings From the After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools/ADAPT Study

While a caregiver's military status per se is not a risk factor for children's adjustment, deployment is a significant family stressor, which places children at risk for behavior and emotional problems. We hypothesize that deployment (i.e. separation from spouse and children), exposure to combat, reintegration, and further deployment) may impair parenting by influencing parents' emotion regulation capacities. We report baseline data from the After Deployment: Adaptive Parenting Tools study, an NIH-funded effectiveness study of a parenting program for Reserve component families. Data were gathered from N = 89 military and civilian parents in families where a parent had deployed to the current conflicts. Parents completed self-report measures of emotion regulation, and parenting. On average, deployed individuals (N = 52) reported more difficulties in emotion regulation than civilian parents. Across gender, mothers reported more difficulties than fathers with deployed mothers reporting the most difficulties. Emotion regulation explained a significant proportion of the variance in parenting practices, and associations of deployment to parenting and emotion regulation approached significance in a regression analysis. Results are discussed in the context of the challenges facing deployed parents (particularly mothers) and the potential for programs targeting parenting in military families experiencing deployment.