Adverse Childhood Experiences and Parenting Stress in Foster Families: Mentalizing as a Pathway to Strain.

Abstract

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can compromise parents' ability to form supportive and attuned parent-child relationships, and mentalizing may be a critical conduit linking ACEs to perceived relational strain, a core dimension of parenting stress. Foster parents may be especially vulnerable due to elevated ACE exposures and the demands of parenting children with complex needs in high-stakes caregiving contexts. Despite these risks, research examining how ACEs influence perceived relational strain through mentalizing remains limited in foster families. Data was obtained from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a psychoeducational mentalizing intervention for 89 foster parents. A mediation analysis tested mentalizing as an indirect influence on links between parental ACEs and perceived relational strain (as a key dimension of parenting stress). ACEs were associated with increased pre-mentalizing scores, reflecting a reduction in mentalizing capabilities (b = 0.098, p < .05), which in turn was associated with higher levels of perceived relational strain (b = 8.61, p < .001). Bootstrapping (with 5,000 samples) confirmed a statistically significant indirect effect (b = 0.84, 95% CI [0.06, 1.62], p = .034). The contributions of ACEs and mentalizing to perceived relational strain were asymmetrical; ACEs explained 5% of the variance in mentalizing (R² = 0.05), whereas ACEs and mentalizing together explained 31.6% of the variance in parenting stress (R² = 0.316). Sensitivity analyses supported the temporal ordering of variables through longitudinal design. This study highlights the importance of mentalizing capacity as a critical pathway linking ACEs to perceived relational strain in this sample of foster families.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10826-026-03280-7.