Abstract:
Parents with addiction and mental health challenges (also known as psychopathology) can struggle to consistently and responsively meet their children’s needs. This can increase children’s risk for future mental health problems and adverse developmental outcomes. Sometimes the effects of parent addiction and psychopathology are subtle, less “visible”, and unfold in diverse, complicated processes that are difficult for researchers to capture or explain. Consequently, this requires scholars to adopt more sophisticated or creative empirical approaches to enrich our understanding of associations between addiction, psychopathology, parenting, and child development. However, few studies explicitly, intentionally, or strategically combine theories (which help explain complex phenomena) with diverse methods or advanced analytical approaches to explore the nuance, novelty, and complexity of these associations. This talk demonstrates the utility of integrated and intentional theory-methods-analysis approaches via multiple studies that merge developmental theories, diverse methods, and advanced analyses (e.g., longitudinal, structural equation (SEM), and person-centered analyses). Studies 1 and 2 combine affective developmental theories with longitudinal SEM to examine how and why parental substance use and psychopathology uniquely predict infant emotional development and trajectories of anxiety and depression across early childhood. Study 3 combines social-affective-cognitive developmental theories with mixture modeling to examine heterogeneous associations between maternal alcohol dependence, psychopathology, and parental scaffolding and parent-child problem-solving behaviors.
Debrielle Jacques is an Assistant Professor of Child Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington. Research-wise, she is broadly interested in a) the developmental effects of parent psychopathology and b) childhood risk, resilience, developmental psychopathology, and general child development in adverse family environments. Specifically, she is interested in studying how and why addiction (especially among mothers) impacts parenting - including parent social cognition, parenting attributions, parenting behavior, and parent-child interactions - and consequently, child development, including the development of psychological problems. In studying children of mothers with substance use disorders, she is also interested in better understanding the underlying function of the strategies children use to navigate these family environments, including a) how children calibrate and adjust these strategies to environmental changes over time (e.g. increasing levels of domestic violence in the home), and b) understanding when, why, and how these strategies become maladaptive and harmful to children's long-term psychological development.
