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Much is known about the effect of parent-child relationships on child health; less is known about how parent-child relationships influence parent health. To assess the association between aspects of the parent-child relationship and parent metabolic outcomes, and whether these associations are moderated by parent gender. Five metabolic outcomes (systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, total cholesterol and glycated hemoglobin) were assessed among 261 parents (45.83 ± 5.50 years) of an adolescent child (14.57 ± 1.072 years). Parents completed questionnaires assessing their child's hassles and the quality of their days with their child. Parents' perceptions of their child's hassles were associated with parent heart rate (B = 2.954, SE = 1.267, p = 0.021) and cholesterol (B = 0.028, SE = 0.011, p = 0.010), such that greater perceived child hassles were associated with higher heart rate and cholesterol levels, on average. These associations were not moderated by parent gender (all ps > 0.30). Parent report of their day with their child was not associated with parent metabolic outcomes (all ps > 0.20). Parent gender moderated the association between parent report of their day with their child and parent systolic blood pressure (B = 13.861, SE = 6.200, p = 0.026), such that less positive reports were associated with higher blood pressure readings among fathers, but not mothers. This study suggests that parent metabolic health may in part be influenced by aspects of the parent-child relationship.

As the United States becomes more diverse, the ways in which mainstream institutions recognize and address race and ethnicity will be increasingly important. Here, we show that one novel and salient characteristic of an institutional environment, that is, whether a school emphasizes the value of racial and ethnic diversity, predicts better cardiometabolic health among adolescents of color. Using a diverse sample of adolescents who attend more than 100 different schools in predominantly urban locations, we find that when schools emphasize the value of diversity (operationalized as mentioning diversity in their mission statements), students of color, but not white students, have lower values on a composite of five biomarkers of inflammation, have less insulin resistance and compensatory β-cell activity, and have fewer metabolic syndrome signs and score lower on a continuous metabolic syndrome composite. These results suggest that institutions that emphasize diversity may play an unacknowledged role in protecting the health of people of color and, thus, may be a site for future interventions to reduce health disparities., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Legal precedent establishes juvenile offenders as inherently less culpable than adult offenders and thus protects juveniles from the most severe of punishments. But how fragile might these protections be? In the present study, simply bringing to mind a Black (vs. White) juvenile offender led participants to view juveniles in general as significantly more similar to adults in their inherent culpability and to express more support for severe sentencing. Indeed, these differences in participants' perceptions of this foundational legal precedent distinguishing between juveniles and adults accounted for their greater support for severe punishment. These results highlight the fragility of protections for juveniles when race is in play. Furthermore, we suggest that this fragility may have broad implications for how juveniles are seen and treated in the criminal justice system.

American women still confront workplace barriers (e.g., bias against mothers, inflexible policies) that hinder their advancement at the upper levels of organizations. However, most Americans fail to recognize that such gender barriers still exist. Focusing on mothers who have left the workforce, we propose that the prevalent American assumption that actions are a product of choice conceals workplace barriers by communicating that opportunities are equal and that behavior is free from contextual influence. Study 1 reveals that stay-at-home mothers who view their own workplace departure as an individual choice experience greater well-being but less often recognize workplace barriers and discrimination as a source of inequality than do mothers who do not view their workplace departure as an individual choice. Study 2 shows that merely exposing participants to a message that frames actions in terms of individual choice increases participants' belief that society provides equal opportunities and that gender discrimination no longer exists. By concealing the barriers that women still face in the workplace, this choice framework may hinder women's long-term advancement in society.