Features of parent-child interaction as predictors of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral markers of resilience in children of alcoholics

Research in child development suggests that parental communication is one of the primary influences on children's healthy adjustment and development of prosocial skills. Interactions between parents and children establish norms for how one is to manage emotion, develop a strong sense of self, and demonstrate social competence. In families of alcoholics, however, features of interaction between parents and children may have different outcomes. The communication environment in families of alcoholics can be characterized by conflict, neglect, and inconsistencies, which are often associated with emotional, cognitive, and behavioral challenges for children of alcoholics. Despite these challenging circumstances, some children of alcoholics manage to successfully adapt to the conditions in their family and become resilient in the face of adversity. This study considers how features of interpersonal communication in the family may act as a protective factor for children of alcoholics and facilitate resilience. The goals of this study are three-fold. First, the study sets out to gain a better understanding of adolescent resilience by examining emotion regulation ability, expressive self-efficacy, and impulsivity as markers of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral well-being. Second, the research draws on Baumrind's (1991) parenting styles typology and Gottman's (2001) Emotion Regulation Theory to examine responsiveness, control, emotion coaching, and emotion dismissing as features of parents' communication behavior that predict adolescent resilience for children of alcoholics and children of non-alcoholic parents. Third, this study explores a variety of methods to assess resilience, extend existing communication constructs, and examine the extent to which features of parent-child communication and adolescent resilience differ between children of alcoholics and children of non-alcoholics. To address these goals, this study invited parent-adolescent dyads (30 from families with an alcoholic parent, 30 from families without an alcoholic parent) to participate in a study in which they completed self-report measures of the parent's communication behavior and the adolescent's resilience, adolescents' heart rate variability was measured to account for physiological changes in emotion regulation, and both parent-adolescent dyads participated in two video-taped interactions that were later coded for various features of parent-child communication and markers of resilience. The results highlight the importance of parental communication in promoting adolescent resilience and point to some notable differences in these associations between families with an alcoholic parent and families without an alcoholic parent. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for advancing the literature on family communication, promoting adolescent resilience, and responding to the challenging communication climate in families of alcoholics.