Work

Cross-cultural evidence for positive control and mind-mindedness as buffers for parental distress

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Parental distress impacts children’s emotional adjustment, highlighting the need to identify protective factors. Promising candidates include positive control (i.e., autonomy support, indexed by parental encouragement, praise, and open-ended questions) and representational mind-mindedness (the propensity for parents to view children as independent agents). To counterbalance the focus on European and North American samples, we included 849 parent-child dyads from England, Hong Kong and Mainland China ( M child age = 5.17 years, SD = 0.51). Parents rated their own distress and child internalizing problems; their interactions with their children were assessed for positive control, and their speech samples were coded for representational mind-mindedness. In a single-paper meta-analysis, parental distress was associated with elevated child internalizing problems and low positive control consistently across sites, but only associated with low mind-mindedness in England. Within-site analyses showed that intergenerational associations in distress-internalizing problems were attenuated by positive control in Mainland China and by mind-mindedness in England; multi-group modeling demonstrated that this latter effect was site-specific. These findings highlight the importance of widening the cultural scope of this research field.

Source: Communications Psychology

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00484-x