THE BUFFERING ROLE OF PARENTAL REFLECTIVE FUNCTIONING IN THE RELATION BETWEEN PARENTAL STRESS, CONTROLLING PARENTING AND SOCIO-EMOTIONAL DIFFICULTIES AMONG INTERNATIONAL ADOPTEES

Summary
The present PhD project aims to investigate the buffering role of parental reflective functioning in adoptive parents’ stress, in their quality of parenting and, ultimately in their adopted children’s socio-emotional adjustment. Using a longitudinal, experimental and developmental psychopathology approach, this project wishes to better understand the emergence of socio-emotional difficulties during the first years after adoption (the early adoptive period) and the transition to adolescence.
The pre-adoption history of international adoptees is often characterized by varying levels of pre-adoptive adversity. At least a subgroup of adoptees has more socio-emotional difficulties than their non-adopted peers. The heterogeneity observed in the early psychosocial adjustment of internationally adopted children increases even further during adolescence, a period that is also associated with increased stress reactivity and an increased risk for socio-emotional difficulties and psychopathology. To explain the vast heterogeneity in adoptees’ developmental outcomes, calls have been made to identify individual and contextual factors that buffer or catalyze the development of socio-emotional difficulties, with adoptive parents being a major source of contextual influence. Adoptive parents are confronted with various normative and adoption-specific parenting challenges and stressors, including the child’s socio-emotional difficulties. In the face of these stressors, parents may turn to controlling parenting behavior, thereby engaging in pressuring, intrusive and domineering practices that are detrimental to child development. Parental reflective functioning, or the capacity of parents to understand their own and their child’s behavior in terms of mental states, is likely to play a buffering role in adverse effects of parenting stress on child development. With regard to the early adoptive period, this PhD will investigate whether parenting stress is influenced by both parent and child characteristics, more specifically parental self-criticism and child negative affectivity (Study 1), and whether parents’ pre-adoptive reflective functioning buffers the association between proxies of pre-adoptive adversity and socio-emotional child difficulties 4 years after placement (Study 2). With regard to the transition to adolescence, a diary-method study (Study 3) and an experimental study (Study 4) will be used to investigate the potential buffering role of parental reflective functioning in associations between parental stress, controlling parenting, socio-emotional child difficulties.
Taken together, this PhD aims to further our understanding of resilience among international adoptees and their parents, thereby forwarding parental reflective functioning as a key protective resource in the dynamic interplay between parent- and child-factors, parental stress reactivity, controlling parenting and the child’s socio-emotional difficulties.