Article about Parent - Child physiological synchrony

The main goal of the study was to examine whether emotional parenting was positively or negatively associated with parent-child physiological synchrony for school-age children.

Parent-child synchrony during interaction might possess important features that underlie parenting processes throughout development. 

Conforming to this trend in parenting research, the current study considered both the physiological and behavioral aspects of parenting and examined whether emotional parenting behaviors captured in parent-child interaction. 

It  associated with moment-to-moment parent-child physiological synchrony for children in their middle childhood.

However, children in their middle childhood are becoming more independent actors in parent-child interactions.

Parenting behaviours 

The emotional parenting behaviors of interest in this study included psychological unavailability and psychological control. 

• The emotional unavailability scale reflected the extent to which a parent failed to be aware of or respond appropriately to the child’s emotional needs.
• The psychological control scale measured the extent to which the parent failed to recognize the child’s individuality and attempted to control the child’s opinions, ideas, and feelings.

The linear regression analyses predicting parent-child physiological synchrony from emotional parenting behaviors for each task were adopted to examine whether the parent-child physiological synchrony of each task could be explained by the emotional parenting behaviors.

The findings added to the knowledge on this line of research and were generally consistent with findings on parent-child behavioral synchrony suggesting that synchrony was a positive indicator of parenting .

However, we found that such physiological synchrony was associated with different parenting behaviors in varying parent-child interactive contexts.