Session: How Internal Experiences Shape Parenting and the Parent-Child Relationship (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

Early caregiving experiences are foundational to children’s development, yet the internal processes that shape parenting and caregiving behavior remain poorly understood. Caregivers’ internal experiences—spanning representational, psychological, and physiological domains—impact caregiving quality across development, influencing how caregivers respond to their children’s emotional and physiological cues. Caregiving quality, in turn, supports children’s emerging emotional, behavioral, and social development and mental health outcomes. When these internal processes function adaptively, caregivers are more likely to respond in attuned and adaptive ways; however, when disrupted, caregiving quality may be compromised, increasing children’s risk for adverse developmental outcomes.

This symposium brings together complementary papers by authors from four institutions examining how caregivers’ internal experiences impact caregiving behavior across the prenatal, postpartum, and early childhood periods. Although grounded in different theoretical frameworks, including attachment theory and biopsychosocial models of interoception, these papers converge on a shared focus: internal caregiver processes as key mechanisms through which risk and resilience are transmitted within the parent-child relationship. Across papers, authors highlight the relevance of these findings for social work research and practice, identifying these processes as targets for intervention within high-risk parent-child dyads and underscoring the need to strengthen caregiving processes in clinical and community settings.

In the first paper, the authors examine whether parents’ perceptions of their infants, and related emotional states, during the prenatal period moderate the association between prenatal depression and child maltreatment risk among expectant mothers and fathers. Attachment-based representations significantly moderate this association, with distinct patterns for mothers and fathers. In the second paper, the authors examine how posttraumatic symptoms and opioid cravings jointly relate to observed parent-infant interactions across the postpartum year among mothers with substance use disorder. The interaction between posttraumatic symptoms and opioid cravings predicts lower maternal sensitivity and greater maternal withdrawal and intrusiveness, despite non-significant main effects. In the third paper, the authors test whether maternal interoception—the perception and integration of internal bodily states—moderates the association between maternal anxiety and fear-enhancing parenting in mother-child dyads (children ages 4-8). Maternal anxiety predicts greater fear-enhancing parenting at low levels of interoceptive awareness, but not at high levels, indicating a buffering effect of maternal interoception.

Together, these papers demonstrate that caregivers’ internal experiences are central to understanding parenting, with implications for child development. Findings clarify how specific internal processes shape variability in caregiving quality and when caregiver distress may translate into disrupted parenting. Importantly, this work moves beyond identifying caregiver risk (e.g., trauma, anxiety) to demonstrating how these risks manifest in caregiving behavior, highlighting modifiable processes that can be targeted to improve caregiving quality. An expert in intergenerational transmission of risk and vulnerability will discuss the implications of this research for social work practice and policy. These findings inform more precise assessment of caregivers’ internal processes and guide social work interventions that strengthen caregivers’ ability to identify, interpret, and regulate internal states to support adaptive caregiving. Accordingly, they support development of responsive, evidence-based services that promote family well-being and the common good by strengthening the bonds that connect us.