Related data for: Parents' past bonding experience with their parents interacts with current parenting stress to influence quality of interaction with their child

Healthy dyadic interactions serve as a foundation for child development and are typically characterized by mutual emotional availability of both the parent and child. However, several parental factors might undermine optimal parent-child interactions, including the parent’s current parenting stress levels and the parent’s past bonding experiences with his/her own parents. To date, no study has investigated the possible interaction of parenting stress and parental bonding history with their own parents on the quality of emotional availability during play interactions. In this study, 29 father-child dyads (18 boys, 11 girls; father’s age = 38.07 years, child’s age = 42.21 months) and 36 mother-child dyads (21 boys, 15 girls; mother’s age = 34.75 years, child’s age = 41.72 months) from different families were recruited to participate in a 10-min play session after reporting on their current parenting stress and past care and overprotection experience with their parents. We measured the emotional availability of mother-child and father-child play across four adult subscales (i.e. sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, non-hostility) and two child subscales (i.e. involvement and responsiveness). Findings from the pooled father-child and mother-child samples showed that fathers exhibited greater non-intrusiveness compared to mothers. Regression slope analyses showed that when parenting stress is low, higher parental overprotection would predict greater adult non-hostility. In the mother-child sample, slope analyses showed that when parenting stress is low, higher paternal overprotection would predict greater adult sensitivity. These results suggest that parents' present stress levels and past bonding experiences with their parents interact to influence the quality of the dyadic interaction with their child.