General Audience Paper

For this assignment, I wrote about the relationship between parental reactivity and children anxiety. I was able to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process by allowing my peers to read my essay. Another outcome I was able to achieve is engaging in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond; by explaining to my readers in simpler terms about the research study I read. In addition I used figurative language to understand the topic. Thirdly, by using the online database such as CCNY Library database, I learned to practice using various library resources and online databases to locate sources for this general audience paper. I enjoyed writing this paper because it was very unique from writing a formal IMRAD style paper. Furthermore, in my introduction I was able to include a short anecdote about how anxiety related between my mom and me. This is unusual for me to include an anecdote because usually in any science report, I am not allowed to include myself in the report.

The Tension Between Children and Parents
In every household, there are moments when the parents are stressed about their children getting hurt. What is the reason behind that action? Why do parents stress before allowing their children to do an action? These two questions remind me of a personal experience. Every time I wanted to go outside at nighttime or do something risky such as skydiving, my mom would transfer her tension to me by sharing stories from the news. “Why don’t you understand? Do you want to be part of the percentage of those kids dying from zip lining?” This is a typical example children face with their parents every day. But, the question arises, why do these anxiety arise between children and parents?
Throughout this article, the relationship between parent and child anxiety symptoms from the following study, “Parental Reactivity and the Link Between Parent and Child Anxiety Symptoms” will be discussed. All parents moderate their child’s learning experience by helping them discover, identify, experience, express, and control their emotional behavior. This is known as emotional reactivity, which means the immediate behavior or action to measure their reaction from the subjective experiences. As part of this reaction, the physiological feature of the emotion has two features: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). Both of these systems come in handy: the SNS helps the human body adapt to the stressful environment and PNS responds to the SNS reaction by allowing the body to undergo the changes. As part of the PNS response, the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is where the main function of the automatic nerve response occurs and it directly influences the heart. The purpose of this study was to see how the normal level of the RSA can change in response to
stress and lower emotion reactivity.
Moving on to the experiment, the researchers were trying to measure the relationship between parental anxiety and parent and child emotion reactivity. For this experiment, there were four qualitative experiments given to both the students and their parents: child and parental anxiety, child’s subjective reactivity, parental reactivity, and children physiological reactivity. Most importantly, this study was given to both children and parents (who have kids between the ages of eight and twelve.) For each experiment, the researchers’ hypothesis was that the parent
will have more anxiety if their children do something that is frightening. 2. parents’ reactivity will control the relationship between parents’ anxiety and children’s resting,3. there will be a higher positive correlation between parental and children anxiety from the child reactivity. The first survey was given to the parents regarding their anxiety. This survey consisted of 7 questions and each of the answer choices had a five-point Likert scale, 0 meaning “not at all” and 4 meaning “extremely”. An example of the questions is “Suddenly scared for no reason”. The next survey was about parents’ reactivity to their offspring’s fear. The parents have presented three situations describing a typical scenario of when their children would get scared such as, “Last night, your child was reading a mystery novel while alone at home and got scared. How emotionally upset do you feel when you think about this situation?” Using the Likert scale, the parents were provided with seven answer choices: 1 meaning “not upset at all” and 7 meaning “really, really upset”.
On the other hand, the children were given the survey on a different scale (Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children) and three scenarios. One of the surveys was about child anxiety, which evaluated four aspects of anxiety: 1. Physical symptoms,2. Social anxiety,3.Harm avoidance, and 4. Separation anxiety. For each aspect, they were given a scenario and four points Likert scale answer choices. As it follows, “I keep my eye open for
danger” and the four answer choices were as follows: 0 for “never true about me” to 3 “often true about me”. The purpose of this survey was to evaluate the children negative emotion or subject reactivity to fear. Unlike the other surveys, they were given a picture scenario and they had to describe the figure using one of the words, “very happy, scared, sad, pleased, frown, and good”. The last experiment performed on the children was the Children’s Physiological Reactivity. Children were given electrocardiogram equipment and they were seated in a comfy
chair in front of the computer to watch the television screen. The purpose of this experiment was to measure how long the child can remain still as possible.
After going through different surveys, the results were as described. In the first experiment, they wanted to see the parental reactivity between parents anxiety and children reactivity. They saw that there was not a significant correlation between parents anxiety and children reactivity to fear. Next, in the second experiment, they wanted to see the dynamic between parental anxiety and children resting. They noticed that parents were the main factor to change the behavior of the children’s’ resting position, which means that there was not a significant change between parental anxiety and children resting RSA. Lastly, for the third experiment, the purpose was to test how the children reaction can change the relationship between parent and children anxiety symptoms. In terms of the results, there was no proof of the link between the parent and children anxiety by the RSA. Overall, from the three minor results of this survey, the major takeaway was that the children resting RSA was an indirect variable depending on the parental reactivity of the situation.
Now that the researchers finalized the results, they wanted to discuss their findings and the reasoning behind each of the result. Their goal for this study was to analyze two variables that may have been in the three relationships between parent and children anxiety, parental reactivity to children’s fear, and children’s subjective and physiological reactivity. As evidence for the hypothesis, they found that parental anxiety and children’s reactivity was statistically significant for parents who show a higher reactivity to their children’s fear. This makes sense because after parents see something frightening, they will pass on their fear to their children by
reacting in front of them. This is relatable between me and my mom; whenever she experiences something scary, she will make me feel scared by showing her reaction to me. This result remains the same regardless if the children are given the equipment because they are reacting prior to the experience they had before with their parents. Similarly, the researchers claim that parents have an emotional engagement with their children who are experiencing fear and lower reactivity. Meanwhile, this connects to the association between parents with higher emotional engagement with their children and parents who face low anxiety for their children. All of these
findings have a similar result, which is that there is an indirect association between parents and children in all of the cases: child and parental anxiety, child’s subjective reactivity, parental reactivity, and children physiological reactivity.
All in all, the result was not surprising because it was all that was expected based on the experiment. It is interesting to see how one parent’s reaction was similar to that of the other parent reaction like a carbon copy. The scenarios in this experiment were very similar to the reaction and pressure between me and my mom.