Autonomy Supportive Parenting in Refugee Parents: Examining the context of PTSD and Post-migration Stress at Resettlement

Abstract

Frequently people who were forced to flee their homes and resettle in a new country continue to experience traumatic symptoms. Traumatic symptoms can amplify the stress related to common migration-related challenges such as language barriers or discrimination. For parents, the evoked stress may drain parental capacities, thereby interfering with child-benevolent autonomy-supportive parenting. To put these relationships to test, we drew upon intensive longitudinal data from the parenting as it is lived project on 55 refugee parents of adolescents who migrated to the Netherlands up to five years before data collection (81.8% female, 74.5% Syrian, M_age= 39.94, 〖SD〗_age= 5.57). Participants responded to measures of traumatic symptoms, post-migration stress, and autonomy-supportive parenting up to 10 times a day for a period of 6 to 8 days. Two, two-level mediation models based on daily averages of momentary reports (Level 1) nested in participants (Level 2) tested whether post-migration stress partially mediates the relation between traumatic symptoms and autonomy-supportive parenting. Results indicated no significant day-to-day predictions. Yet, more traumatic symptoms went hand-in-hand with heightened post-migration stress, which in turn predicted more instead of less autonomy-supportive parenting on the same days. Within days, traumatic symptoms did not predict changes in autonomy-supportive parenting, with the indirect effect of post-migration stress pointing towards full instead of partial mediation (β_within = 0.17, 95% CI [0.06, 0.31], p < .01). Outcomes highlight the resilience towards traumatic symptoms in refugee’s autonomy-supportive parenting capabilities and offer a broader understanding for the role of post-migration stress in life after refuge.