🙏 Huge thanks to: my co-authors @francescasolmi.bsky.social @jessiebaldwin.bsky.social, Prof Sara R Jaffee, Prof Essi Viding, Prof Jean-Baptiste Pingault & Prof Bianca Lucia De Stavola; the Psychological Bulletin for publishing; and to the ESRC, BBSRC & @wellcometrust.bsky.social for funding.

📌 Take-home: Negative parenting has a small causal effect on DBDs. This modest effect highlights that DBDs have multiple causal influences, suggesting prevention efforts should reduce negative parenting alongside other modifiable risk factors, not treat it as the primary driver.

🌍 Why does this matter? Even small causal effects can have a meaningful public health impact. We estimate that effectively reducing negative parenting could prevent ~4% of DBD cases globally, corresponding to around 4.5 million children no longer meeting clinical thresholds.

🔗 These findings support existing work suggesting that some of the larger associations reported in earlier non-QE research likely reflect genetic and environmental confounding.

🎯 However, effect sizes were smaller in: studies with stronger control for confounding; studies that used different informants for the exposure and outcome; and studies deemed to be higher-quality.

🔍 Moderator analyses: the effect of negative parenting generalised across offspring age and sex, maternal and paternal parenting, and type of DBD symptom.

📊 In contrast, we found no evidence of a causal effect of positive parenting practices (e.g. warmth, involvement) on DBD symptoms.

📈 Results: Across 45 studies from 28 cohorts, using 7 QE methods, we found evidence of a small causal effect of negative parenting (e.g. harsh, hostile, inconsistent discipline) on offspring DBD symptoms (r ≈ 0.13).

🧪 To strengthen causal inference, we meta-analysed QE studies, which estimate causal effects either by exploiting exogenous variation (e.g. difference-in-differences) or by applying confounder-control methods (e.g. propensity scores).

📖 Background: Parenting practices are often linked to DBDs and are a key target of interventions (e.g. parent management training). However, it is unclear whether these associations are causal or reflect genetics and environmental confounding.