However, given that the presence of parental anxiety has been hypothesised to exacerbate other parenting behaviours, such as overprotection (Hudson and Rapee, 2001), it is encouraging that challenging parenting behaviour may be relatively stable in the presence of parental psychopathology.
Alternatively, it may be that challenging parenting behaviour may differ only for parents with clinical levels of anxiety. In the current study the representation of parents reporting elevated anxiety may not have been high enough to detect this relationship.
In fact, only 14.1% of parents in the present sample had a total DASS anxiety score above the population mean of 4.7 (as per the DASS manual; Lovibond and Lovibond (1995)).
Consequently, it remains possible that parental anxiety may impact the relationship towards challenging parenting behaviour however this may not have been captured using the community sample recruited for the present study.