Parent Executive Functioning and Accommodation
Community Summary of: The Relationship Between Parent Executive Functioning and Accommodation
Authors of the article published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies: Emily Wilton, Theresa Gladstone, Anna Luke, Elle Brennan, Christopher Flessner
Published online: 9 November 2021
Community summary posted on January 14th, 2025
Word count: 489
Reading level: 8th grade
Why does this study matter?
Parenting is hard. It impacts how children grow and develop. For example, practices like warmth and support can help children do well. Other practices can increase internal and external problems children experience.
Anxiety is a big problem for many children. Specific parent behaviors might actually increase anxiety for some kids. Researchers want to understand more about the things parents do and don’t do that can impact anxiety symptoms. Therapists might be able to help parents do things differently to help kids with anxiety.
Accommodation is a pretty well understood parenting practice. Accommodation is when parents try to help their children avoid things that make them feel anxious. Accommodation can involve things like changing family routines, avoiding situations, and a lot of reassuring. Accommodation might help in the short-term. In the long-term, researchers have found that it can make anxiety worse.
Executive function (EF) means skills like attention, memory, and mental flexibility. Researchers think that Executive Function (EF) can impact parenting. Parents use EF skills to help their distressed children. Researchers think that EF might be related to accommodation; however, they don’t fully understand this relationship. This study wanted to understand more about how EF might impact accommodation.
What happened?
Parents of children aged 7 to 17 years participated. Eighty of them reported their parenting behavior (including accommodation) according to the Parenting Anxious Kids Rating Scale-Parent Report. Forty-six of them also reported behavior according to the Family Accommodation Scale-Anxiety. They also did additional tasks to measure EF skills. Researchers analyzed the data from these reports to see how strong the relationship between accommodation and EF was.
What did our research team learn?
Researchers did not find a strong relationship between accommodation and EF in the way they had hoped. However, some parts of EF seem to have a pretty strong relationship with accommodation. These parts include planning or organization and inhibitory control. The most widely studied part of EF is inhibitory control, the ability to stop automatic responses. Inhibitory control may be important in helping parents resist providing accommodation when there’s a lot going on.
What can our research team do next?
The research team will need to do a similar study to see if the results are the same. If the relationship between accommodation and parental planning or organization and inhibitory control is stronger, it may help researchers understand this relationship more. It might also help to understand more about why parents accommodate. This will help therapists improve child treatment.