Poster Session 1: Children, Parents, and Families in a Therapeutic Context

Presenters: Diane Harnek Kegan, Cynthia Vejar

Summary
Parents' decisions are often scrutinized publicly and within families. A survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults to determine the incidence of feeling shamed or judged negatively due to a number of provided characteristics and circumstances (e.g. being divorced, feeding child a special diet). Findings suggest that parents' experiences of feeling shamed are wide-spread and coping with these experiences may differ among mothers, who had higher levels of guilt self-talk, and fathers, who had higher levels of blame self-talk, according to the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA 3S). Suggestions for implications of shame experiences and gender differences for couples therapy will be discussed.

Objectives
-- To identify the incidence of feeling judged or shamed among parents due to a number of provided characteristics and circumstances.
-- To compare scores of guilt, shame, and blame self-talk for mothers and fathers on the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA 3S)
-- To discuss the process of using Qualtrics to gather a nationally representative sample through a stratified random sampling method.

Subject Codes: parenting, family processes, coping
Population Codes: marital status, relational status, and family structure or identity, nationally-representative
Method and Approach Codes: mixed-methodology