ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2025
Parent-child relationship quality buffers the association between mothers' adverse childhood experiences and physiological synchrony.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Systematic Review on Parent-Child Synchrony: The Role of Stress, Resilience and Psychopathology.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2026Pooled it
- Psychophysiology of Parenting School-Aged Children: A Systematic Review of the Physiological Correlates of Parenting Behaviors.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Pooled it
- Parental physiological responses shape how children's emotional reactivity relates to aggression.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Mother-Child Inter- and Intra-personal Affect Is Associated With Dynamic Trajectories of Physiological Self-Regulation in Black and Latinx Youth.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Growth in Early Mother-Child Dyadic Qualities and Relations to Preschool Problem Behavior.Social development (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Mother-Infant Relational Quality Following a NICU Stay: Investigating the Role of Maternal Childhood Experiences.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
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5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundFamily environment plays a critical role in shaping stress response systems. Concordance between mothers' and children's physiological states, specifically their Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), reflects dyadic co-regulation. Negative or weakened RSA synchrony during interactions is linked to various psychosocial risks, but existing research has focused on risks in the mother or child as opposed to the dyad. This study examined the association between maternal-child RSA synchrony and maternal ACEs, given documented associations with offspring RSA, as well as more proximal documented risks, including maternal psychopathology and children's early adversity and psychopathology. Given that sensitive parent-child relationships are a powerful source of resilience, we tested whether parent-child relationship quality buffered associations between maternal ACEs and RSA synchrony.
methodsIn a community sample of mother-child dyads experiencing high sociodemographic risk and oversampled for exposure to adversity, mothers (n = 123) reported on their ACEs (43.1% ≥4), their 3-5-year-old children's exposure to violence, and psychological symptoms. Dyads completed a puzzle task while EKG was recorded, from which maternal and child RSA was derived; parent-child relationship quality during interactions was coded observationally. Multilevel models examined within-dyad mother-child RSA synchrony across the interaction and between-dyad predictors of synchrony.
resultsParent-child relationship quality and maternal ACEs co-contributed to offspring and dyadic physiology. Maternal ACEs predicted dampened RSA in the child and dampened RSA synchrony in the dyad, only among dyads with low observer-rated parent-child relationship quality during the interaction. In other words, high-quality parent-child relationship quality buffered the association between maternal ACEs and dampened offspring and dyadic physiology.
conclusionsResults suggest that mothers' early adversity may disrupt physiological regulation at both the individual child and dyadic level. High-quality parent-child relationships mitigated this effect.
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