Browsing by Author "Tuominen, Mirka"

Objectives. Anxiety disorders and anxiety symptoms are common even as a child, and they cause a major burden to the child as well as to the society. In order to prevent anxiety disorders it is important to understand the predisposing factors to anxiety. The influence of child's temperament and parenting style on children's anxiety symptoms have both been studied, but the results are partly controversial, and there's only a limited number of longitudinal studies. The importance of interactions between temperament and parenting style has been emphasized, but the amount of interaction studies is scarce. The aim of this study is to examine the associations between child's temperament and anxiety symptoms, associations between parenting style and child's anxiety symptoms, and whether parenting style is a moderator between the association with temperament and anxiety symptoms. Methods. The sample consisted of 262 mother-child dyads participating in the Glychyrrhizin in Licorice-study. Mothers assessed their child's temperament with the Children's Behavior Questionnaire and their parenting style with the Parent Behavior Inventory when the children were 5,5 years old. Children assessed their anxiety symptoms with the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders when they were 12 years old. The associations between the variables were analyzed using regression analyzes. Results and conclusions. High negative emotionality and its subfactors anger, fear, sadness and low soothability were associated with several anxiety symptoms. Extraversion was not associated with any anxiety symptoms, but its subfactor high impulsivity predicted increased anxiety symptoms. Low effortful control and its subfactor low inhibitory control were associated with symptoms of school phobia, and low intensity pleasure was associated with panic symptoms. Anxiety symptoms were associated with hostile/coercive parenting style, but not with supportive/engaged parenting style. Both parenting styles moderated some of the associations between temperament traits and anxiety symptoms. The findings give support both to the independent effect of temperament to children's anxiety symptoms and interactions between temperament and parenting. The findings give also some preliminary support to the "goodness of fit" –model, indicating that the effect of parenting style on children's anxiety symptoms may depend on child's temperament.