Abstract
Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious and debilitating disorder that can develop following exposure to a traumatic event. Where parents develop PTSD, it may have an impact on their parenting role.
Objective: The objective was to review the existing evidence base on parental PTSD, examining whether parental PTSD has an impact on key parenting domains.
Method: A comprehensive web-based search identified 27 quantitative studies that examined parental PTSD in relation to parenting domains.
Results: Several parenting domains were investigated including: parenting satisfaction, parenting stress, the parent–child relationship, and specific parenting practices. Sample sizes ranged from 19 to 3931 parents. A range of parental traumas were investigated, including traumatic birth experiences, military trauma, and intimate partner violence. Findings indicated associations between parental PTSD and several domains of parenting, but there were inconsistencies across studies.
Conclusions: Findings suggested that parental PTSD is associated with impaired functioning across a number of parenting domains, including increased levels of parenting stress, lower parenting satisfaction, less optimal parent–child relationships, and more frequent use of negative parenting practices, such as overt hostility and controlling behaviours. However, methodological limitations across the literature as a whole limited the potential to infer causal impacts of PTSD on parenting. Further study is also needed to advance our current understanding around the impact of different trauma types on parenting domains.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1550345 |
| Journal | European Journal of Psychotraumatology |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Jan 2019 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:HC is funded by the Economic Social Research Council, South West Doctoral Training Partnership PhD studentship. MT is supported by the National Research Foundation, South Africa and is a Lead Investigator of the Centre of Excellence in Human Development, University Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- family
- parenting
- parent–child relationship
- Posttraumatic stress disorder
- trauma
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Psychiatry and Mental health
Access to Document
- The impact of parental posttraumatic stress disorder on parenting: a systematic review
Copyright 2022 the authors. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and source are cited.