Parental substance abuse has been linked to both avoidant and intrusive parental responses to child distress in observational paradigms — interaction styles that have also been associated with impaired emotion regulation in children. In turn, emotion dysregulation is associated with increased risk for early onset substance use, substance abuse disorders, as well as increased activation in the limbic system, decreased prefrontal cortical activation, and decreased functional and structural connectivity between these two regions. However, the specific pathways between prenatal and postnatal parental substance abuse, parenting behavior in a distress-eliciting task, and the neural substrates of self-regulation in young children remain unknown.

The goal of this pilot project is to examine associations among prenatal and postnatal parental substance abuse, parenting styles, and the neural substrates of self-regulation in a sample of 502 preschoolers recruited from primary care pediatric clinics. Specifically, this pilot project involves the development and implementation of a observational coding scheme for parent and child behaviors observed using the Parent-Child Observation Schedule (P-COS; Wakschlag et al., 2003). Once coded, this data will be linked with existing information on families, allowing the examination of pathways between parental prenatal and current nicotine, alcohol, and drug use on parenting behavior, child emotion self-regulation, and children’s MRI structural abnormalities and functioning on emotion-related fMRI tasks in a subset of the participants.

After development of a standardized parent-child coding system, a team of coders were trained to achieve inter-rater reliability (ICC ≥ .80) on each of the dimensions of interest. This coding scheme was successfully implemented on all of the 2-3-year olds in the sample (n = 184), with weekly reliability checks on a random 20% of the sample to ensure continued reliability (weekly ICC on each dimension greater than .77). Additionally, training to apply this coding system for observations of 4-6-year olds and their parents has been conducted (maintaining reliability), and is currently being implemented with the remainder of the sample.

The remaining 4-6 year old parent-child observations will be coded, with continued weekly reliability checks on a random 20% of the sample. In the interim, preliminary analyses examining associations between parental substance abuse, parenting practices, child regulatory behaviors, and the neural substrates of self-regulation will be conducted on the families with 2-3 year olds. Once coding is complete, these linkages will be examined with the full sample. These analyses will provide essential information necessary for external funding applications to follow this sample into the period of early onset substance use and abuse (prior to age 15), and eventually into young-adulthood.