Parental reflective functioning – parents’ capacity to envision the mental states underlying their child’s behavior – plays an important role in parenting behavior, parental well-being, and children’s psychosocial outcomes. Most studies have examined parental reflective functioning in terms of relatively stable interindividual differences between parents. This is unfortunate because theoretical accounts suggest that this capacity is susceptible to intraindividual fluctuations. Parenting stress, in particular that associated with difficult child behavior, has been described as a factor that can put parental reflective functioning under pressure. Using a multilevel approach, this 7-day diary study investigated day-to-day fluctuations in parental reflective functioning and its associations with daily parenting stress and perceived internalizing and externalizing adolescent difficulties. Parents of community adolescents (N = 128) and adopted adolescents (N = 28) were sampled because adoptive parents face unique stressors that may challenge their reflective capacities. Results indicated that daily parenting stress was associated with more daily prementalizing (i.e., severely biased mentalizing), less daily certainty about mental states, and less interest and curiosity in the adolescent’s mental states. Whereas externalizing difficulties were similarly related to more daily prementalizing and less certainty about mental states, findings for internalizing difficulties were mixed. Most associations were consistent across biological and adoptive parents.

Higher levels of parental reflective functioning are associated with normatively developing children’s secure attachment and better socioemotional functioning. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit more severe behavioral problems than normatively developing children, which hinder social adaptation and impose significant parenting challenges. However, the relationship between parental reflective functioning and behavioral problems in children with ASD remains underexplored, with most studies being cross-sectional. The present study examined reciprocal associations between parental reflective functioning and behavioral problems over a 6-month period across three timepoints in a sample of 180 Chinese parents of children with ASD using cross-lagged panel analyses. The result revealed a bidirectional relationship between parental reflective functioning and children’s internalizing behavioral problems. Higher level of pre-mentalizing predicted increased internalizing behavioral problems at the subsequent time point, and vice versa. A child-driven effect was found in the association between externalizing behavioral problems and parental reflective functioning. A higher level of children’s externalizing behaviors was correlated with increased parental pre-mentalizing and decreased certainty about mental states, as well as reduced parental interest and curiosity, at subsequent time points. The results underscore the importance of developing parenting interventions aimed at enhancing parental reflective functioning to mitigate behavioral problems in children with ASD.

Parental reflective functioning (PRF) plays a protective role in the development of children with histories of early adversity, including adopted children. This is the first study to investigate the developmental trajectories of PRF and children’s socio-emotional problems in the first 4 years after international adoption (N = 48 families, mean age (T1) = 20.7 months) and to examine the mediating role of parenting stress in the relation between PRF and child socio-emotional problems. Multilevel modeling indicated that age at adoption and parent gender moderated the development of PRF and child socio-emotional problems. Moreover, decreases in PRF were associated with more socio-emotional problems in the children. These relations were mediated by parenting stress, and particularly feelings of incompetence and marital dissatisfaction.