Parental interaction style, child engagement, and emerging executive function in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD)

ABSTRACT

Children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are known to experience cognitive and neurobehavioral difficulties, including in areas of executive function and social skills development. Interventions for these challenges have focused on a number of areas, including parent-based training. Despite the general consensus that specific parenting styles consistent with an “authoritative” – warm but firm – parenting approach may influence behavioral self-regulation, it is not known what specific parental interaction styles are associated with child engagement and emerging executive function in this population. The current study used an observation-based behavioral coding scheme during parent–child play interactions and associated parent report-based executive function measures in children with FASD. Here, we demonstrate that parental interaction styles with increased responsive/child-oriented behavior and parental affect are associated with higher levels of child play engagement, while parental interaction that has increased achievement-orientation is associated with higher levels of emerging executive function in children with FASD. These findings help inform future studies on behavioral targets in parent-based training programs and highlight the importance of considering certain parental interaction styles during parent–child play.

KEYWORDS:

• Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders
• executive function
• parental interaction style
• parent–child play
• child engagement

Acknowledgments

We thank each of the families who participated in this research, Susan (Astley) Hemingway, director and founder of the FAS-DPN, as well as Beth Gendler, and the NeuDLL Lab members who contributed to data coding in support of these analyses: Emily Fowler, Hannah Mikus, and Natalie Stagnone.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the University of Washington Institutional Review Board, Human Subjects Division No. 48563.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI) Small Grant, as well as by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to ITHS under Award Number NIH UL1TR000423.