It has been suggested that if a parent is anxious they may be less likely to engage in behaviour they find challenging or scary or may prevent their children from engaging in situations with an element of risk, interfering with their ability to engage in challenging parenting behaviour with their children (Bögels et al., 2008).
The findings of this study gave no indication that parental anxiety impacted challenging parenting behaviour. As, to the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to empirically test this relationship; further research is required before conclusions can be drawn. 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.