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The COVID‐19 pandemic resulted in a reorganization of adolescents' routines, especially their sleep schedules. Utilising 175 caregiver‐adolescent dyads, the current study examined associations of biological (e.g., prenatal substance use), environmental (e.g., poverty), and relational (e.g., child maltreatment) subtypes of early life adversity (ELA) with various components of adolescents' sleep across the first year of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Relational ELA explained unique variance in adolescents' sleep disturbances, but not other sleep components, following short‐ and longer‐term exposure to the COVID‐19 pandemic. However, the direction of this association switched such that relational ELA predicted decreased sleep disturbances during the initial phase of the U.S. COVID‐19 pandemic in spring 2020 beyond pre‐pandemic levels, but, over time, contributed to increased sleep disturbances beyond early‐pandemic levels as the pandemic extended into the winter of 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The United States (U.S.) Surgeon General Advisory has characterized the COVID-19 pandemic as a youth mental health crisis. Thus, elucidating factors affecting adolescents' mental health during the pandemic is important for supporting youth through current and future challenges. Parenting influences adolescents' ability to cope with stressors, and emotion regulation strategy use may underlie these effects. Methods: This longitudinal study of 206 adolescents (49% female; 46.6% Latine) from the U.S. evaluated pathways from perceived parental warmth and affection at age 12 to changes in adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems from before the pandemic (age 14) to the initial phase of the U.S COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 (age 15) through adolescents' prepandemic cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression emotion regulation strategy use at age 14. Results: Parental warmth and affection predicted decreased internalizing, but not externalizing, problems during the initial phase of the pandemic, and this effect was explained by adolescents' reduced reliance on expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. Conclusion: These findings illuminate parenting and emotion regulation strategy selection as modifiable processes to support adolescents' mental health in this crisis and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This longitudinal investigation evaluated parental cultural socialization practices as a central mechanism by which parents' cultural values influence developmental outcomes in ethnic–racial minority children. Drawing on a sample of 129 Latina mothers and their children (48.1% daughters and 51.9% sons), path analyses evaluated hypothesized individual and interactive contributions of mothers' Latina heritage and American mainstream cultural orientations to changes in children's self‐esteem via overt and covert cultural socialization practices. Mothers reported on their cultural orientation and socialization practices when their children were ages 5 and 8, respectively. Children reported their self‐esteem at ages 8 and 10. Controlling for family socioeconomic status, mothers' nativity status, and prior child self‐esteem, path analyses revealed a significant indirect effect from mothers' heritage orientation to increased child self‐esteem via overt cultural socialization practices. Interestingly, a multigroup analysis by gender showed that mothers' heritage orientation was positively related to overt and covert cultural socialization practices toward both daughters and sons, but the indirect paths to child self‐esteem through cultural socialization did not attain significance for daughters. Moreover, among sons, the indirect path through overt cultural socialization predicted increased self‐esteem, whereas the indirect path through covert cultural socialization predicted decreased self‐esteem. These findings show that cultural socialization is a salient process by which parental cultural orientation influences children's self‐esteem while highlighting the specificity of these effects across overt and covert expressions of cultural socialization and child gender. Efforts to promote positive self‐esteem among Latinx children should encourage parental cultural socialization practices, such as teaching, reading, and/or performing activities that celebrate the Latinx culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a reorganization of adolescents' routines, especially their sleep schedules. Utilising 175 caregiver-adolescent dyads, the current study examined associations of biological (e.g., prenatal substance use), environmental (e.g., poverty), and relational (e.g., child maltreatment) subtypes of early life adversity (ELA) with various components of adolescents' sleep across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational ELA explained unique variance in adolescents' sleep disturbances, but not other sleep components, following short- and longer-term exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the direction of this association switched such that relational ELA predicted decreased sleep disturbances during the initial phase of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 beyond pre-pandemic levels, but, over time, contributed to increased sleep disturbances beyond early-pandemic levels as the pandemic extended into the winter of 2020., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Using an ecological framework, this 2-wave longitudinal study examined the effects of parentification on youth adjustment across the transition to adolescence in a high-risk, low-income sample of African American (58%) and European American (42%) mother-child dyads (T1 Mage = 10.17 years, T2 Mage = 14.89 years; 52.4% female). Children's provision of family caregiving was moderately stable from early to late adolescence. Emotional and instrumental parentification evidenced distinct long-term effects on adolescents' psychopathology and the quality of the parent-child relationship. Ethnicity moderated these relations. Emotional and instrumental parentification behaviors were associated with predominantly negative outcomes among European American youth in the form of increased externalizing behavior problems and decreased parent-child relationship quality, whereas emotional parentification was associated with positive outcomes among African American youth in the form of increased parent-child relationship quality, and instrumental parentification was neutral. These findings support a multidimensional view of parentification as a set of culturally embedded phenomena whose effects can only be understood in consideration of the context in which they occur., (© 2014 FPI, Inc.)