Parents’ Spontaneous Attributions about their Problem Child: Associations with Parental Mental Health and Child Conduct Problems

Parents’ attributions abouttheir child’s personality and behaviour are known to predict the quality of parent-child interactions and outcomes for the child, including those from parenting interventions. Nothing is known, however, aboutthe quantity and quality of attributionsparents use during free speech abouttheir children referred for treatment of behavioural and emotional problems. We tested hypotheses aboutthe types of attributionsand associations among parental attributions, parental psychopathology and child conduct problems, using 504 five-minute speech samples (FMSS) coded using the Parent AttributionSpeech Sample (PASS) coding system. Both mothers and fathers talked abouttheir thoughts and feelings regarding their children with disruptive behaviour problems (N = 295; 74% male; 3–8 years old). The assessment of spontaneous parental attributionsvia the PASS coding system was shown to be valid and reliable. Mothers made more negative, dispositional attributionsthan fathers, however, parents of either gender made, on average, more positive than negative attributions abouttheir children. Parents’ natural attributions aboutthese children with emotional and behavioural problems were rather independent from parents’ own mental health, but were consistently related to child factors. Specifically, across parent gender and across all attributiondimensions, levels of callous-unemotional traits were associated with spontaneous parental attributionsabove and beyond other child and parent factors. Overall, the results show that parents’ spontaneous speech aboutreferred children contains important information abouttheir causal attributions, and that these are associated with child temperament rather than specific referral symptoms.