Maternal and Paternal Parenting and Maltreatment in Relation to Callous-Unemotional Traits in Detained Male Adolescents

• Published date: 01 January 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15412040241258774
• Author: Thomas Cassart,Stijn Vandevelde,Olivier F. Colins
• Date: 01 January 2025
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

2025, Vol. 23(1) 52–71

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/15412040241258774

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Maternal and Paternal

Parenting and Maltreatment in

Relation to

Callous-Unemotional Traits in

Detained Male Adolescents

Thomas Cassart

1

, Stijn Vandevelde

1

, and Olivier F. Colins

1



Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between parenting practices, childhood maltreatment

(CM), callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and conduct disorder (CD) symptoms among 275 de-

tained adolescent boys (M

age

= 16.96). CU traits, and paternal and maternal parenting were

assessed via self-report questionnaires. A diagnostic interview was used to assess CD symptoms.

Regression analyses revealed that harsh parenting and physical maltreatment were positively

associated with CU traits after controlling for CD symptoms, whereas warm parenting was

signif‌icantly negatively related to CU traits. After controlling for the overlap between parenting

and CM, only parenting was signif‌icantly positively related to CU traits. Findings, f‌inally, showed

that CU traits did not moderate the link between parenting (or CM) and CD symptoms. The study

underscores that it is important to consider experiences with parenting practices and CM in

detained adolescents with heightened CU traits.

Keywords

adolescent offenders, callous-unemotional traits, parenting, childhood maltreatment, antisocial

behavior

Introduction

Children and adolescents with conduct problems (CP) are heterogenous in etiological pro-

cesses, severity, and prognosis (Fairchild et al., 2019;Moul et al., 2018), which may explain

the great variability in treatment responsiveness (Perlstein et al., 2023). Evidence suggests

that callous-unemotional (CU) traits are helpful to designate a subgroup of children and

adolescents with CP who are more etiologically homogeneous. CU traits in youth are similar

1

Department of Special Needs Education, University of Ghent, Gent, Belgium

Corresponding Author:

Thomas Cassart, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Ghent, Henri Dunantlaan 1, Gent 9000, Belgium.

Email: thomas.cassart@ugent.be

to the affective features of adult psychopathy and are commonly characterized by def‌icient

empathy and guilt, insensitivity to others’feelings, shallow emotions, and sometimes also by a

lack of concern about performance in important activities, such as education or work (e.g.,

Andershed et al., 2002;Colins et al., 2014;Frick & Viding, 2009). There is some evidence that

criminal justice-involved youth with CP and CU traits, are, for example, more likely to engage

in aggression (e.g., Colins, 2021), to have an earlier onset of antisocial behavior (e.g., Colins

et al., 2017a), to show anomalies in emotion processing (e.g., Aghajani et al., 2021), and to

exhibit lower levels of treatment engagement (e.g. Bisback et al., 2022), relative to their

counterparts with CP only. Hence, CU traits seem important for designating a clinically

important subtype of CP in children and adolescent (e.g. APA, 2013;Frick, 2009). Findings

from multiple studies support the viability of CU traits for subtyping CP, but signif‌icant

limitations have also been reported (e.g. Colins et al., 2020;Colins et al., 2021;Frick et al.,

2014), including work on the association between parenting, CU traits, and CP (Waller et al.,

2013).

Parenting appears a critical risk factor in the etiology (Frick et al., 2014) and treatment of

CP that co-occur with CU traits (e.g. Fleming et al., 2022;Waller, et al., 2015a). Yet, in-

tegration of research is diff‌icult because markedly different research questions have been

tested in varying samples and using different designs (Waller et al., 2013). Moreover, the bulk

of studies focused on (early) childhood, with relatively few studies that examined associations

between parenting, CU traits and CP (or other indices of antisocial behavior ; e.g. Goagoses &

Schipper, 2021) among adolescents. While (early) childhood is a particularly critical de-

velopmental period to study the role that parents play in the development and maintenance of

CU traits and CP (e.g. Waller & Hyde, 2017), parenting in adolescence remains important (e.g.

Rothenberg et al., 2020) and has been associated with CU traits (e.g. Kimonis, et al., 2013a)

and CP (e.g. Pinquart, 2017) in adolescents. Furthermore, preliminary evidence tentatively

indicates that intervention programs for adolescents with a parenting component can lead to a

reduction in CU traits (Perlstein et al., 2023), which is encouraging given CU traits in ad-

olescence have been associated with poor developmental outcomes (e.g. Goulter et al., 2020).

Hence, research is needed that scrutinizes if adolescents with CP and CU traits differ in their

exposure to parenting practices from their counterparts without CU traits. Furthermore,

associations between parenting, CU traits, and CP rarely have been examined in adolescents

with clinically signif‌icant CP or severely antisocial behavior (but see Pauli et al., 2021).

Therefore, work with high-risk youth is required to test if parenting is related to CU traits and

if parenting is related to CP at different levels of CU traits (Waller et al., 2013).

Some research with criminal justice-involved adolescents showed tha t maternal and pa-

ternal warmth were negatively associated with CU traits (Bisby et al., 2017;Chinchilla &

Kosson, 2016;Kimonis, et al., 2013a;Vaughan et al., 2023), whilst harsh parenting was not

signif‌icantly associated to CU traits (Edens et al., 2007). However, these studies did not

control for CP,renderi ng it unclear if warm parenting is associated with CU traits, independent

of CP (Clark & Frick, 2018). There is one notable exception, though, showing that harsh and

warm parenting in early childhood were not or inversely related to adolescent CU traits after

controlling for CP, respectively (Goulter et al., 2020). Some studies also tested the theory that

parenting is only related to CP in individuals without CU traits (Wootton et al., 1997).

Findings conf‌irmed this moderating effect of CU traits among detained youth, though only for

negative parenting (Edens et al., 2007;Kimonis, et al., 2013a), not for warm parenting

(Chinchilla & Kosson, 2016). Yet, f‌indings are mixed since warm parenting have also been

shown to be inversely associated with CP for individuals with higher levels of CU traits (e.g.

Clark & Frick, 2018;Pauli et al., 2021).

Cassart et al. 53