Maltreatment and socioeconomic factors can be stressors for families: Childrens' reactivity to stress varies as a function of socioeconomic status, and abusive parents manifest stress in harsher abuse or more pronounced neglect.

That was the keynote message delivered by Elizabeth Skowron, an associate professor in the College of Education, during a recent symposium organized by the Family Systems Institute in Sydney, Australia.

The symposium was titled, “Parenting and the Family System: Unraveling the Complexity of Child Focus.”

Skowron, of the Counseling Psychology and Human Services department, presented “Parent-Child Processes: Negative Self-Regulatory and Behavioral Outcomes.”

She works with at-risk, mostly lower-income families, with a focus on the ways that maltreatment and socioeconomic factors act as stressors within a family system.

Habitually abusive parents actually encounter more physiological discomfort when they try to engage in positive parenting, a sort of stress “loop” that Skowron hopes to close through better interventions.

“Our work is showing that patterns of physiological response during the act of parenting differ in parents who engage in child abuse and neglect,” Skowron said. “However, understanding those patterns will help us to develop new interventions that can support parents’ efforts to reduce their harsh behaviors and enjoy parenting more.”

Skowron’s research attracted the interest of the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, an Australian organization similar in its aims to the college's Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Neglect and its functional arm, the 90by30 initiative, which aims for a 90 percent reduction in child abuse and neglect in Lane County, Oregon by 2030.

Skowron met with representatives from NAPCAN on behalf of 90by30 to try and identify partnerships for the two programs. Because of the similarities between the programs, and the international perspective it would bring, NAPCAN plans to participate in the 2014 90by30 conference.

- from the UO College of Education