Profiling Parent’s Responses to Children’s Anxiety: A Qualitative Study Combined with Multiple Correspondence and Cluster Analyses

Abstract

Parental influence and children’s anxiety have a complex interaction. Robust findings revealed that parenting styles and practices, modeling, and parent-child emotion socialization play a role in a child’s anxiety. However, research has focused on global behavioral and emotional tendencies derived from quantitative studies with large samples, neglecting their link to parental cognitive factors and the heterogeneity of the family’s distinctive experiences. Our study aimed to broaden this knowledge, capture what parents think, feel, and behave during anxiety-enhancing childhood experiences, and identify distinct parental profiles based on these complementary elements. The present study adopted a cross-sectional qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 65 parents of children with anxiety disorders (9–12 years old). A content analysis was first performed, and then representations of the associations between the emergent categories obtained from the content analysis, and latent constructs that can work as major determinants in parents’ responses to the child’s anxiety, were assessed by a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) combined with a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Parental cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are first derived into two distinct dimensions: capacity to respond and emotional reactivity. Three typological profiles of parents were derived from these dimensions: (a) Reactive and ineffective; (b) Unreactive and moderately effective, and (c) Anxious and effective. The qualitative exploration of parental cognitions, emotions, and behaviors in a child’s anxiety context contributes to engrossing the current literature. Our results have essential implications and the need to adjust treatments in clinical settings according to parents’ profiles.