UC Irvine

As a group, substance-abusing parents are at risk for maladaptive parenting. The association between substance abuse and parenting may result, in part, from parents' emotional disengagement from the parent-child relationship, which makes perceiving and responding to children's cues more challenging. In this study, we examined whether substance-abusing mothers' levels of disengagement from their relationship with their children (ages 2-44 months), operationalized in two different ways using parenting narratives (representational and linguistic disengagement), prospectively predicted children's engagement and disengagement cues during a structured mother-child interaction. Within a sample of 29 mothers, we tested the hypotheses that greater maternal disengagement at Time 1 would predict a decrease in children's engagement and an increase in children's disengagement at Time 2. Results indicated that representational disengagement predicted a decrease in children's engagement cues whereas linguistic disengagement predicted an increase in children's disengagement cues. Results provide partial support for a reciprocal, iterative process in which mothers and children mutually adjust their emotional and behavioral disengagement with one another.