Cross-cultural evidence for positive control and mind-mindedness as buffers for parental distress

Abstract Parental distress impacts children’s emotional adjustment, highlighting the need to identify protective factors. Promising candidates include positive control (i.e., autonomy support, indexed by parental encouragement, praise, and open-ended questions) and representational mind-mindedness (the propensity for parents to view children as independent agents). To counterbalance the focus on European and North American samples, we included 849 parent-child dyads from England, Hong Kong and Mainland China ( M child age = 5.17 years, SD = 0.51). Parents rated their own distress and child internalizing problems; their interactions with their children were assessed for positive control, and their speech samples were coded for representational mind-mindedness. In a single-paper meta-analysis, parental distress was associated with elevated child internalizing problems and low positive control consistently across sites, but only associated with low mind-mindedness in England. Within-site analyses showed that intergenerational associations in distress-internalizing problems were attenuated by positive control in Mainland China and by mind-mindedness in England; multi-group modeling demonstrated that this latter effect was site-specific. These findings highlight the importance of widening the cultural scope of this research field.

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Publication Details

Journal
Communications Psychology
Published
2026-06-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00484-x
Primary Topic
Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Cross-cultural evidence for positive control and mind-mindedness as buffers for parental distress

Catherine Wu, Jean Anne Heng, Caoimhe Dempsey, Elian Fink et al.
Communications Psychology
Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
article

Cross-cultural evidence for positive control and mind-mindedness as buffers for parental distress

Catherine Wu, Jean Anne Heng, Caoimhe Dempsey, Elian Fink, Laure Lu Chen, Zhen Wu, Zhenlin Wang, Rory T. Devine, Mishika Mehrotra, Claire Hughes, Mikeda Jess, Hana D’Souza, Chengyi Xu, Siu Ching Wong, Louise Gray, Ayalguu Agtchin, Jiayin Zheng, Miryam Edwards (22653307)
article en

Abstract

Abstract Parental distress impacts children’s emotional adjustment, highlighting the need to identify protective factors. Promising candidates include positive control (i.e., autonomy support, indexed by parental encouragement, praise, and open-ended questions) and representational mind-mindedness (the propensity for parents to view children as independent agents). To counterbalance the focus on European and North American samples, we included 849 parent-child dyads from England, Hong Kong and Mainland China ( M child age = 5.17 years, SD = 0.51). Parents rated their own distress and child internalizing problems; their interactions with their children were assessed for positive control, and their speech samples were coded for representational mind-mindedness. In a single-paper meta-analysis, parental distress was associated with elevated child internalizing problems and low positive control consistently across sites, but only associated with low mind-mindedness in England. Within-site analyses showed that intergenerational associations in distress-internalizing problems were attenuated by positive control in Mainland China and by mind-mindedness in England; multi-group modeling demonstrated that this latter effect was site-specific. These findings highlight the importance of widening the cultural scope of this research field.

Communications Psychology
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK), University of Sussex (GB), University of Cambridge (GB), Education University of Hong Kong (HK), Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health (CA), Massey University (NZ), Cardiff University (GB), University of Birmingham (GB), Tsinghua University (CN)
Tsinghua University, Economic and Social Research Council
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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