Adversity, developmentally appropriate attributions, and parenting during homelessness: Resilience in an expanded...

The family stress model has illuminated pathways from economic hardship to parents' psychological distress to impaired caregiving. However, there is less family stress model research examining other risk processes that link parental stressors to parenting or resilience processes that counteract these pathways. This study examined parents' developmentally appropriate attributions (DAAs) of young children's behavior as a link between multiple dimensions of parental adversity and stress, and multiple parenting indicators. Parental DAAs were hypothesized to (a) stem from childhood, cumulative, and contemporaneous adversity and stress and (b) relate to parenting quality. Participants were 95 mothers (M = 30.26 years, SD = 5.74, range = 20.01-45.66 years; 67.4% Black, 11.6% White, 7.4% bi-/multiracial, and 13.6% other) and their 4- to 6-year-old children residing in emergency shelters in a Midwestern metro area. Mothers completed validated measures on their own childhood abuse and neglect, DAAs, cumulative sociodemographic risk, current perceived stress and psychological distress, and the 5-min speech sample, later coded for expressed emotion (EE). Mother-child dyads then completed a 20-min structured interaction subsequently coded for observed effective parenting. Mothers' higher levels of childhood neglect and perceived stress were associated with their lower DAAs. In turn, higher DAAs were related to lower EE negativity, higher EE warmth, and more effective observed parenting. Parental DAAs may be a malleable target for interventions guided by the family stress model and resilience frameworks that could help parents reframe interpretations of ambiguous child behaviors in more benign, empathic, and developmentally sensitive ways to promote more positive parenting behaviors and relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).