Postmigration Stress Compromises Refugee Parents’ Self-Efficacy and Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: An Experience Sampling Study

Refugee parents raise their adolescent children in a world that is different from the world they themselves grew up in, often experiencing postmigration stress. This may hamper parents' confidence in their parenting skills and make it difficult for them to grant adolescent children the autonomy they desire and need. In this preregistered study, we aimed to advance our understanding of this process by examining, in daily life, whether postmigration stress contributes to less autonomy-supportive parenting through compromised feelings of parental self-efficacy. Fifty-five refugee parents of adolescent children resettled in the Netherlands (72% Syrian; M age children = 12.81) reported on their postmigration stress, parental self-efficacy, and parental autonomy support up to 10 times a day for 6-8 days. We fit a dynamic structural equation model to test whether postmigration stress predicted reductions in parental autonomy support, and whether parental self-efficacy explained this link. Results showed that when parents experienced more postmigration stress, they granted their children less autonomy at a later timepoint, in part, through parents feeling less efficacious after having experiencing postmigration stress. Findings held after controlling for parents' posttraumatic stress symptoms, and when controlling for all possible temporal and lagged associations. Our results highlight that postmigration stress shapes parenting practices, above and beyond symptoms of war-trauma, in the daily lives of refugee families.