The Mediating Effects of Parenting Stress on the Relationship Between Mindfulness and Parental Responsiveness

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationships between mindfulness, parenting stress, and parental responsiveness. In the current study, parental responsiveness is defined as the attunement and sensitive reaction to the child's needs, parenting stress is defined as the stress experience related to the specific demands of parenting and the parent-child relationship, and mindfulness is defined as the self-regulation of attention and the non-evaluative acceptance of immediate experiences. The nation-wide sample included 128 adult parents of children ages 0-17 who were invited via social networking and advertising websites to take part in an online study on parenting and consisted primarily of married, Caucasian, middle-class mothers of young children. Participants completed the Nurturance Scale from the Child-Rearing Practice Report (Block, 1965), the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, 1995), and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (Baer et al., 2008). Results of a Preacher and Hayes (2008) mediation analysis demonstrated support for the mediating effect of parenting stress on the relationship between trait mindfulness and parental responsiveness; the indirect effect was a1b 1+a2b2 = .0675, CI = .0255 to .1262. As hypothesized, results indicated that the more mindful parents are, the more attuned and responsive they are to their child's needs, and that this phenomenon is explained by the lower levels of parenting stress associated with higher levels of trait mindfulness. Further, post-hoc analyses indicated additional support for the recursive relational aspect (i.e., parent-child interaction) of the constructs. Specifically, the parent-child dysfunctional interaction component of the parenting stress measure and the more relationally influential facets of the mindfulness measure accounted for the variance in the mediation model. Findings of this study provide further support for the benefits of mindfulness and add to the emerging body of research indicating the beneficial effects of mindfulness in interpersonal relationships. Implications of these findings include practical utility in both clinical and non-clinical populations, including using mindfulness skills to attenuate parenting stress and enhance effective parenting. The current findings offer support for the possibility of increasing parental responsiveness, a parenting practice well established to be largely beneficial for the child, through enhancing mindfulness and reducing parenting stress.