One potential factor that may impact on the degree to which parents use challenging parenting behaviour is the parent's own psychopathology, in particular parental anxiety. Studies observing the parenting behaviour of anxious mothers in clinical (Whaley et al., 1999) and community samples (Woodruff-Borden et al., 2002) have found that during interactions with their children, anxious mothers have been noted to grant their children less autonomy. Further, research by Turner and colleagues (Turner et al., 2003), found that anxiety disordered parents were less likely to engage in physical play with their child than non-anxious parents.