PNEI Review

Parenting attachment styles and children mental health

Stefania Carbonella, Marilena Coniglio — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The attachment relationship is a signiﬁcant, long-lasting bond of both an affective and emotional nature, which is created regardless of whether the parent is able to emotionally tune in to the child. Poor social-emotional competence of the caregiver has been associated with several types of dysfunctional developmental trajectories including poor ability in the school performance of the offspring. Attachment styles, parenting stress, and exposure to adverse childhood events can negatively affect the development of biological systems that regulate cognitive abilities such as executive functions (EF), the perception and the regulation of emotions. Neuroscience has highlighted the centrality of limbic circuits in the development of parent-child attachment bonds, human adaptation and learning processes, as well as highlighting the inﬂuence of attachment styles on the development of an adequate sense of self-efﬁcacy and self-esteem.

PNEI in new parenting challenges. Oppositional children, Hikikomori, cyber-dependents and cutters

Federica Lavista — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the new century, clinical conditions related to the historical context and strongly influenced by parental style become manifest in the developmental age. When investigating the genesis of these conditions, the molecular, neuroendocrine and behavioural levels must be borne in mind, starting with the links between the oxytocin affliction system, the dopamine gratification system and the glucocorticoid stress axis, in order to help identify key targets for prevention and intervention. Non-suicidal self-injury, oppositional defiant disorder, borderline personality disorder in comorbidity with internet addiction and Hikikomori profiling are examined. Many authors have explored the relationship between exposure to Early Life Stress, insecure attachment patterns and altered reward processing, which manifests itself in a spectrum of manifestations ranging from risk behaviour to depression. The extent to which maladaptive parenting is associated with emotional dysregulation is well known, therefore, providing families with a space for parenting support is tantamount to offering a prevention and treatment tool of fundamental importance.

The rediscovered father: anthropological and psychoneuroendocrine aspects of the new fatherhood

Franco Baldoni — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last century there has been a profound transformation in the role of the father. After thousands of years in which families were organized around a patriarchal model, within a few decades family systems have transformed into what can be deﬁned as the contemporary nuclear family. Research has highlighted how important the father is today from the beginning of conception and throughout the early childhood of his offspring. This has inﬂuenced not only the relationship between the couple and with their children, but also on the biological structure of man, with changes on the epigenetic and neuroendo- crine level inevitably also inﬂuencing the psychological health of the father. Today we know that paternal perinatal affective disorders are almost as frequent as female ones, but their diagnosis is difﬁcult as fathers tend to express their emotional difﬁculties differently from women. A signiﬁcant step forward in the study of fathers (and mothers) is represented by their evaluation in a systemic ecological perspective.

Young people and adults. Systemic crisis

Francesco Bottaccioli — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We complete, in this issue, a monograph, begun in the last issue, on the complex and deteriorated relationships between children and parents From the numerous studies analysed by our authors, it emerges clearly that the difficulties that children, adolescents and young adults increasingly encounter are the result of poor parenting, characterised by an insecure attachment style that renders adults incapable of transmitting emotional and executive self-regulation skills to children, resulting in low levels of self-efficacy and self-esteem.