Examining child stress response, parenting and relationship-related changes associated with a dyadic mindfulness and self-compassion program

Interventions that dyadically equip families with self-compassion skills represent a promising approach for addressing mental health challenges, particularly during the key transitional period of middle childhood. This study examines changes and candidate processes associated with participation in the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Children and Caregivers (MSC-CC) course.

Twenty-three caregiver-child dyads (Child, M _age=8.78; Caregiver, M _age=41.2) participated in MSC-CC, delivered remotely over six weekly group sessions. Pre- and post-intervention assessments included self-report measures of parenting and relational closeness outcomes during a dyadic stressor task (behavior, reflective functioning[RF], and physiology). Analyses investigated pre-post change in primary outcomes and linear mixed-effects models estimated time-related changes and baseline moderators of physiological change. Significance tests identify pre-post increases in parenting and emotion-supportive beliefs.

Physiologically, we detected significant decreases in child physiological arousal. Exploratory moderation analyses suggest, among others, low levels of mindfulness and high RF at baseline predict the largest reductions in child stress physiology. While uncontrolled, the MSC-CC participation was associated with increases in mindful parenting and the caregiver-child relationship and lower child physiological arousal during a dyadic challenge, most prominently in families with lower emotion-supportive beliefs at baseline. Altogether, this highlights candidate processes and moderators of efficacy to be confirmed in a fully powered randomized controlled trial.

ClinicalTrials.gov, Self-Compassion for Children and Caregivers (SCCC), NCT05818397, registration and study start on 2023-10-16.