Method

Participants

The sample consisted of 36 mothers and 2 fathers who reported three or more major depressive episodes and were currently either in full or partial remission. The parents’ mean age was 36.2 years (SD = 5.1). In total, 71 % (n = 27) of participants were married, 8 % (n = 3) were cohabitating, 11 % (n = 4) were divorced, 5 % (n = 2) were separated, and 5 % (n = 2) were single. The majority of participants (58 %, n = 22) had a university degree or professional qualification, 32 % (n = 12) had a college or vocational qualification, and 8 % (n = 3) had some school qualification. Their children’s age ranged from 2 to 6 years (M = 4.1, SD = 1.3); 15 (39.5 %) were girls. Only one child per family participated in the study. In addition to a history of three or more depressive episodes, inclusion criteria were current remission from depression, age 18 or over, and at least one child aged between 2 and 6 years old. Exclusion criteria were current or a history of psychosis, current substance dependence, organic brain damage, persistent longstanding interpersonal difficulties, safe-guarding concerns about children in the family, antisocial behavior or persistent self-harm, and receiving psychological therapy.

Procedure

Recruitment took place through GP practices and advertisement at health and school services. Individuals participated in a screening interview and eligibility was confirmed using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID; Gorman et al. 2004) to assess for depression (including identification of remission status and number of episodes) and comorbidity. Parental consent was obtained for all parents and children to take part in the study, and at this point, all parents completed the measures described below. Randomization then took place with parents randomized to a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy course for parents or to usual care. Parents completed all measures at baseline, prior to any intervention. Further detail about the procedure for the pilot trial is provided elsewhere (Mann et al., under review).

Measures

Parents’ Self-Compassion

The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff 2003b) consists of 26 items, each rated on a five-point Likert scale (1 = almost never to 5 = almost always), which has excellent reliability and validity (Neff et al. 2007). The measure correlates significantly with measures of self-esteem (r = 0.59), self-acceptance (r = 0.62), and self-determination (r = 0.43), and its test-retest reliability over a 3-week interval is r = 0.93 (Neff 2003b). Higher scores indicate greater self-compassion. We used the SCS because it addresses our definition of self-compassion, and while it has some psychometric limitations, it has shown adequate reliability and validity and is the best available measure (Williams et al. 2014).

Parents’ Depression

Parents’ depression was assessed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID; Gorman et al. 2004). A trained researcher asked parents questions to assess for current depression and any past history of depression. The SCID for DSM-III-R has been compared to gold standard diagnoses (in which all available medical information was used, in addition to information from the SCID), and it demonstrated 91 % specificity and 84 % sensitivity (Basco et al. 2000). Its inter-rater reliability for diagnosing major depressive disorder is k = 0.66 (Lobbestael et al. 2010).

Parents’ Depressive Symptoms

The Beck Depression Inventory Second Edition (BDI-II; Beck et al. 1996) is a 21-item questionnaire structured around cognitive and affective symptoms. Scores 0–13 indicate minimal depression, 14–18 mild depression, 19–29 moderate depression, and 30–63 severe depression. The scale has excellent reliability (a = 0.94) and convergent validity. Significant correlations that range from −0.19 to −0.65 have been found between the BDI score and measures of general perceptions of health and functioning in the expected direction (Arnau et al. 2001).

Parents’ Sensitive Responding

Parent–child pairs took part in three tasks: (1) free play with no specific instructions, (2) a highly structured Lego task designed to be hard for the child to complete unaided, and (3) a tidy up task where the parent and child tidied all toys away. Each task lasted for 5 min. Interactions were video-recorded and were coded later using the Coding of Attachment-Related Parenting (CARP; Matias et al. 2006). The CARP is based on attachment theory and assesses the quality of parent–child interaction styles. Parents’ sensitive responding was rated on a seven-point scale ranging from 1 = unresponsive/insensitive parent to 7 = responsive/sensitive parent. An overall score of sensitivity was created by adding the scores from all three tasks. The CARP’s sensitivity scale has been demonstrated to significantly correlate with the security of children’s attachment as measured by a story stem procedure, rs = 0.20, ps < 0.5 (O’Connor et al. 2013). The stability of ratings over a year has been demonstrated to be satisfactory, r = 0.66, while inter-rater reliability has been demonstrated to be good with intraclass correlations of 0.73 (O’Connor et al. 2013).

Researchers were trained by the developers of the measure (National Academy of Parenting Research (NAPR), Kings College London). Prior to coding the study data, researchers coded gold standard videos to check the reliability of their coding. Inter-rater reliability as assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) calculated using a two-way random absolute agreement, which was excellent (ICC > 0.8 for both coders). Raters attended weekly meetings to avoid coding drift. Coders were blind to participants’ scores on the measures of interest at the time of coding.

Parents’ Attributions of Their Children’s Behavior

Parental attributions concerning their children’s behavior were assessed using a measure of parental attributions, developed by Dadds, Scott, and Woolgar at the National Academy of Parenting Research (NAPR, UK) from earlier work assessing the impact of parental attributions on parenting and children’s behavior (Dadds et al. 2003). It uses a semistructured interview consisting of six ambiguous scenarios of children’s behaviors and asks parents to imagine their child in each scenario. The current study focused on the parents’ answers to two questions: “How would you describe the behavior” and “why is he/she acting like that?” Answers were allocated two codes according to the valence (defined below) and attribution that parents reported in relation to their child’s behavior. The code assigned for valence refers to the parents’ interpretation of the child’s behavior and was coded on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from (+2/positive) to (−2/negative). A score of zero indicates a neutral judgment.

The separate code assigned to attribution refers to the cause the parent ascribed to their child’s behavior. An internal attribution ascribes the behavior to personal dispositions, traits, or abilities (commonly global and stable over time) whereas an external attribution ascribes the causes to situational demands and environmental constraints (commonly situation specific and transient). Attribution was coded on a five point-Likert scale; the highest score (+2) represented an internal and the lowest code (−2) an external attribution. A zero score indicates a mixed attribution.

The scores from these two scales were then combined to calculate total scores for positive and negative attributions, respectively. The “negative attributions” score aimed to quantify the tendency of parents to attribute children’s negative behavior to internal and often stable characteristics of the child. It was calculated by adding the attribution scores from each scenario in which the valence was rated negatively. The total positive attribution score was similarly calculated by adding the attribution scores from each scenario in which the valence was rated positively. This aimed to estimate the extent to which childhood behaviors were attributed to external demands and environmental factors that the child was reacting to versus internal, longstanding character traits.

The attribution measure coder was trained and assessed for inter-rater reliability (prior to coding the study data) by NAPR. The ICC was calculated using a two-way random absolute agreement. The coder achieved ICC = 0.9 for valence and ICC = 0.7 for the attribution domain. Coders were blind to participants’ scores at the time of coding.

Data Analyses

We first examined correlations of self-compassion with sensitive responding and attributions. Hierarchical linear regressions were undertaken to test the association between parents’ self-compassion (independent variable) and parenting behaviors (attributions and sensitive responding). We controlled for the effects of confounding variables including children’s gender and parents’ education and current depressive symptoms. Child gender was included as the literature indicates some differences in parenting between boys and girls. For example, Maniadaki et al. (2005) found that parents of preschool children attributed more intentionality for hyperactive/ impulsive behaviors to boys than girls. Parenting difficulties are also more likely to occur if parents suffer from depression (e.g., Lovejoy et al. 2000; Wilson and Durbin 2010) and are less educated (Davis-Kean 2005).

Children’s gender, parents’ education, and current depressive symptoms were entered at step 1 and self-compassion at step 2. Although the sample was small, hierarchical regressions were used because we were less interested in how much variance in the outcome was explained by all the predictors. In addition, the residuals were normally distributed and there were no outliers. Finally, we calculated effect sizes using adjusted R 2 which is a better indicator of the effects on the population.