Bidirectional and transactional relationships between parenting styles and child symptoms of ADHD, ODD, depression, and anxiety over 6 years

It is well established that mothers’ parenting impacts children's adjustment. However, much less is known about how children's psychopathology impacts their mothers’ parenting and how parenting and child symptoms relate either bidirectionally (i.e., a relationship in both directions over two time points) or transactionally (i.e., a process that unfolds over time) to one another over a span of several years. In addition, relatively little research addresses the role of fathers’ parenting in the development of children's symptoms and, conversely, how children may elicit certain types of parenting from fathers. In this study, data were collected from 491 families on mothers’ and fathers’ parenting styles (authoritarianism, authoritativeness, permissiveness, and overprotectiveness) and children's symptoms of psychopathology (attention deficit, oppositional defiant, depression, and anxiety) when children were age 3, 6, and 9 years old. Cross-lagged panel analyses revealed that parents and children affected one another in a bidirectional and transactional fashion over the course of the six years studied. Results suggest that children's symptoms may compound over time partially because they reduce exposure to adaptive and increase exposure to maladaptive parenting styles. Likewise, maladaptive parenting may persist over time due to the persistence of children's symptoms.