“Inside-out Mechanisms of Parental Practices and Children’s Externalizing Problems: the Role of Authoritarian Parenting Style, Parental Irrational Beliefs, Emotion Regulation, and Distress“

Effectively responding to children’s noncompliance and/or temper tantrums can be challenging for parents. It is even more challenging in the context of parents’ own need to regulate their emotions. Recent reviews emphasized the role of parents’ emotion regulation abilities in children’s mental health. The present study aims to investigate two sequential mediation models of the relationship between authoritarian parenting style, parental practices, and children’s externalizing problems, by examining the mediating role of rational/irrational parental beliefs regarding child noncompliance, parental emotion regulation strategies, and parental distress. Participants (N = 238) are parents of children (ages 2–8) identified as having elevated levels of noncompliance and/or temper tantrum behaviors. We examined the two sequential mediation models via path analyses. Authoritarian parenting style was significantly and positively associated with parental irrational beliefs, parental emotion regulation difficulties, parental distress, harsh and inconsistent parental practices, and children’s externalizing problems. Our results support both models of mediation, with the model investigating the link between authoritarian parenting style and parental practices indicating a better fit. This study offers a better understanding of the emotional and cognitive parental mechanisms involved in children’s externalizing problems and the use of parenting practices. Implications of the findings are discussed considering the development of innovative and focused parental interventions for targeting specific interpersonal, emotional and cognitive mechanisms in the case of parents who deal with children’s noncompliance and/or temper tantrum behaviors.