When the levee breaks: treating adolescents and families in the aftermath of hurricane katrina

Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface serious questions about the capacity of the public health system to respond to community-wide disaster. The storm and its aftermath severed developmentally protective family and community ties; thus its consequences are expected to be particularly acute for vulnerable adolescents. Research confirms that teens are at risk for a range of negative outcomes under conditions of life stress and family disorganization. Specifically, the multiple interacting risk factors for substance abuse in adolescence may be compounded when families and communities have experienced a major trauma. Further, existing service structures and treatments for working with young disaster victims may not address their risk for co-occurring substance abuse and traumatic stress reactions because they tend to be individually or peer group focused, and fail to consider the multi-systemic aspects of disaster recovery. This article proposes an innovative family-based intervention for young disaster victims, based on an empirically supported model for adolescent substance abuse, Multidimensional Family Therapy (MDFT; Liddle, 2002). Outcomes and mechanisms of the model's effects are being investigated in a randomized clinical trial with clinically referred substance-abusing teens in a New Orleans area community impacted by Hurricane Katrina.     

Differential associations and concordance across measures of parent emotion socialization: The role of parent and adolescent emotion dysregulation

Although parent ratings, adolescent ratings, and observations are all utilized to measure parent emotion socialization during adolescence, there is a lack of research examining measurement differences and concordance. Thus, the present study compared three measures of parent supportive and nonsupportive emotion socialization and examined whether parent and adolescent emotion dysregulation differentially related to these measures or moderated concordance across measures. Participants were a community sample of 92 adolescent-parent dyads. Adolescents were 13–17 years-old (M = 15.5, SD = 1.1), 41 were female and 51 were male; 87% of parents identified as mothers. Observed emotion socialization was coded during a parent-adolescent conflict discussion task. The adolescent and parent also rated the parent's supportive and nonsupportive reactions to the adolescent's negative emotions; they each also rated their own emotion dysregulation. Due to data collection timing, COVID-19 family stress was also assessed and explored as a covariate in analyses. Bivariate correlations indicated that there were weak and non-significant correlations across emotion socialization measures. Multilevel models indicated that measures of parent emotion socialization were differentially associated with adolescent emotion dysregulation, with adolescent emotion dysregulation relating significantly to adolescent ratings, but not observations or parent ratings, of parent emotion socialization. In addition, multiple regressions indicated that there was less concordance across measures when parents were higher in emotion dysregulation. Results suggest that measurement may influence researchers’ conclusions about how youth adjustment relates to parent emotion socialization. Additionally, there may be even lower agreement across measures of parent emotion socialization when parents have emotional challenges.