Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure (LEAP)

Abstract

The Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure (LEAP) is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate adolescents’ and emerging adults’ perceptions of their parents’ emotional availability. Developed by Jackie J. Lum and Vicky Phares (2005), the instrument operationalizes the multidimensional construct of emotional availability (EA)—traditionally assessed via naturalistic observations in infancy and early childhood—into an efficient, self-report inventory suitable for developmental, clinical, and family psychology research. The LEAP comprises 15 items rated independently for mothers and fathers on a 6-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Never) to 6 (Always). The measure captures core relational facets, including parental sensitivity, responsiveness, validation, and emotional supportiveness. Psychometric evaluations across diverse adolescent and college-aged cohorts demonstrate exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently exceeding .90 for both maternal and paternal evaluations (typically .93 to .96), alongside robust 2- to 4-week test-retest reliability ($r > .85$). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have demonstrated a dominant, parsimonious single-factor structure per parent representing global perceived emotional availability, which accounts for the vast majority of common item variance. The LEAP demonstrates strong convergent validity with measures of parental warmth, acceptance, and authoritative parenting, as well as distinct discriminant validity against parental overprotection and socioeconomic status. Crucially, criterion-related validity studies establish that lower perceived parental emotional availability on the LEAP significantly predicts elevated adolescent depressive symptoms, generalized anxiety, low self-esteem, and eating pathology. The LEAP remains a foundational, strength-based assessment tool for clinicians and researchers investigating attachment, parenting dynamics, and youth psychological well-being.

Keywords

Lum Emotional Availability of Parents, LEAP, emotional availability, attachment theory, parental responsiveness, parental sensitivity, adolescent mental health, psychometrics, maternal availability, paternal availability

Authors

The Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure was conceived, developed, and validated by:

• Jackie J. Lum, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States. Dr. Lum’s clinical and research scholarship centers on developmental psychopathology, family systems, parent-adolescent relationship quality, and psychological determinants of adolescent health.
• Vicky Phares, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States. Dr. Phares is an internationally recognized authority in clinical child and adolescent psychology, specifically known for her pioneering work integrating fathers into developmental research, family-based interventions, and adolescent internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure (LEAP) is to provide an empirically grounded, brief, and psychometrically robust self-report measure of perceived parental emotional availability in adolescents and emerging adults. While the theoretical foundations of emotional availability originated in the developmental observational literature of infancy and early childhood (such as dyadic interactions during free play), a substantial methodological gap existed for assessing these relational dynamics in older youth who possess the cognitive capacity to reflect upon and self-report their relational experiences.

Historically, measures of parenting in adolescence emphasized broad dimensions of parental style—such as Baumrind’s typology of authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting—or focused predominantly on behavioral control, monitoring, and overt conflict. Although critical, these instruments often overlooked the nuanced emotional micro-processes that define whether a youth feels psychologically safe, emotionally understood, and validated by their primary caregivers. Lum and Phares constructed the LEAP to capture whether adolescents perceive their parents as approachable, emotionally attuned, empathetic, and genuinely receptive when the adolescent is experiencing distress or seeking connection.

In clinical practice, the LEAP serves multiple evaluative functions:

• Baseline Family Assessment: Identifying whether an adolescent perceives a deficit in maternal or paternal emotional attunement, which often underlies hidden distress, acting-out behaviors, or school-related refusal.
• Differential Parent Appraisal: Because respondents rate their mother and father separately, clinicians can contrast maternal versus paternal emotional availability, revealing relational discrepancies, parental triangulation, or specific attachment figures who may serve as protective buffering agents.
• Treatment Planning and Progress Monitoring: Tracking shifts in family-based interventions (e.g., Emotion-Focused Family Therapy, Attachment-Based Family Therapy) by evaluating whether therapeutic improvements translate into the youth feeling greater parental responsiveness and support over time.

In research contexts, the LEAP has been utilized extensively to investigate pathways linking parenting behaviors to diverse psychopathological outcomes. It has served as a central explanatory variable in studies examining adolescent depressive disorders, self-injurious behavior, borderline personality traits, body dissatisfaction, and clinical eating disorders.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the LEAP is Parental Emotional Availability (EA), defined as a caregiver’s capacity to maintain a receptive, sensitive, attuned, and emotionally supportive posture toward their child’s inner affective states, communicative bids, and developmental needs. Rooted in both affective neuroscience and developmental psychology, emotional availability extends beyond mere physical presence or instrumental caretaking (e.g., providing food, shelter, or transportation); it reflects the psychological quality of emotional attunement and reciprocity within the parent-offspring dyad.

Within the operational framework established by Lum and Phares, parental emotional availability encompasses three interconnected core facets:

1. Sensitivity

Parental sensitivity involves the parent’s ability to accurately perceive, decode, and interpret the adolescent’s emotional signals, nonverbal cues, and affective expressions without distortion. Sensitive parents notice subtle shifts in their child’s mood, respect developmental shifts toward individuation, and avoid misinterpreting adolescent vulnerability as hostility or defiance. On the LEAP, this dimension is reflected in items assessing whether the parent demonstrates genuine interest, pays close attention, and understands the youth’s emotional needs.

2. Responsiveness

Responsiveness reflects the parent’s actual behavioral and emotional readiness to act upon the child’s signals in an appropriate, timely, and validating manner. A responsive caregiver does not invalidate, dismiss, or punish emotional vulnerability. Instead, they provide comfort, actively listen, and demonstrate unconditional warmth. Within the LEAP, responsiveness is captured by statements evaluating whether the parent is willing to talk about troubles, consoles the adolescent when upset, and makes themselves available whenever the adolescent seeks dialogue.

3. Supportiveness and Positive Regard

Supportiveness represents the parent’s proactive scaffolding of the youth’s emotional resilience and self-worth. This involves encouraging the adolescent’s pursuits, valuing their intellectual and creative input, offering genuine praise, and making the youth feel cherished and wanted. On the LEAP, supportiveness is measured through items assessing whether the parent praises the youth, values their opinions, remembers milestones or events that are meaningful to them, and pursues discussions regarding the adolescent’s unique interests.

Although these facets are conceptually rich and distinct, empirical psychometric evaluations indicate that in the minds of adolescents, parental sensitivity, responsiveness, and supportiveness coalesce into an overarching, unified cognitive-affective representation of whether a parent is “safe and emotionally reachable” versus “distant, dismissive, or rejecting.”

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the LEAP is primarily anchored in John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982) and Mary Ainsworth’s foundational work on maternal sensitivity (Ainsworth et al., 1978). Central to attachment theory is the concept of the internal working model—a cognitive-affective schema that individuals construct regarding the availability, reliability, and trustworthiness of relational partners based on accumulated attachment histories. During infancy, secure attachment develops when caregivers function as a safe haven in times of distress and a secure base from which to explore the environment.

As children transition into adolescence and emerging adulthood, attachment dynamics undergo normative reorganization. Physical proximity-seeking transforms into psychological proximity-seeking; adolescents no longer require continuous physical contact, but rather the certainty of parental psychological availability. The LEAP directly operationalizes Bowlby’s premise of the “felt availability” of attachment figures. When youth perceive their caregivers as emotionally accessible, they exhibit lower levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, enabling healthy autonomous exploration and effective affect regulation.

Furthermore, the LEAP builds upon the Emotional Availability Scales developed by Zeynep Biringen and colleagues (e.g., Biringen & Robinson, 1991). While Biringen’s paradigm focused on macro-analytic coding of dyadic interactions between mothers and young children across dimensions of sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility, Lum and Phares extended this framework upward into developmental psychopathology. They translated relational attunement from an observational metric into the phenomenological reality of the adolescent.

The measure is also congruent with Ronald Rohner’s Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory (PARTheory). PARTheory posits that emotional acceptance by parents is a universal requirement for positive psychological adjustment across the lifespan. The LEAP captures the essential experiential indicators of parental warmth, love, and emotional inclusion, demonstrating that adolescent perceptions of emotional abandonment or invalidation constitute significant risk factors for maladaptive developmental trajectories.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the LEAP has been thoroughly substantiated across numerous peer-reviewed empirical studies, utilizing multi-informant, cross-sectional, and longitudinal research designs.

Construct and Convergent Validity

During its initial validation, Lum and Phares (2005) demonstrated strong convergent validity by examining correlations between the LEAP and well-established indices of family functioning, parenting behaviors, and perceived social support. The maternal and paternal LEAP scores demonstrated high, statistically significant positive correlations with:

• Measures of parental warmth, acceptance, and positive involvement on the Children’s Report of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI; $r = .70$ to $.82$).
• Youth-reported general social support from family on the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS; $r = .65$ to $.78$).
• Measures of authoritative parenting practices emphasizing autonomy granting accompanied by emotional warmth.

Discriminant Validity

The LEAP exhibits distinct discriminant validity against constructs that do not reflect genuine emotional connection. For instance, the LEAP correlates weakly or non-significantly with purely instrumental parental involvement (such as rule enforcement, financial provision, or strict behavioral curfew setting) and shows near-zero correlations with family socioeconomic status ($r < .10$), establishing that emotional availability operates independently of household wealth. Furthermore, the LEAP demonstrates negative correlations with parental psychological control, guilt induction, and overprotective intrusiveness ($r = -.35$ to $-.52$), underscoring that emotional availability is distinct from anxious, enmeshed, or hovering parenting behaviors.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The LEAP possesses powerful criterion-related validity in differentiating clinical from non-clinical youth and predicting psychological adjustment:

• Internalizing Symptoms: Substantial literature demonstrates that low maternal and paternal LEAP scores prospectively and concurrently predict elevated scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS). Youth who perceive low parental availability report higher feelings of hopelessness and cognitive helplessness.
• Eating Pathology: In a landmark study by Lum and Phares (2005) published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, parental emotional availability was investigated as an etiological correlate of adolescent eating disturbances. Lower LEAP scores—particularly regarding perceived paternal emotional availability—were significantly associated with higher scores on the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI), drive for thinness, bulimic tendencies, and severe body dissatisfaction, even after controlling for global psychological distress.
• Self-Esteem and Resilience: High LEAP scores correlate strongly ($r = .50$ to $.65$) with global self-esteem measured via the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, affirming that youth who experience their parents as emotionally attuned develop more robust self-concept clarity and internal locus of control.

Reliability

The reliability of the LEAP has been evaluated across multiple independent empirical samples comprising early adolescents, high school students, and university undergraduates, consistently displaying exceptional psychometric precision.

Internal Consistency

The internal consistency of the LEAP is exceptionally high across both maternal and paternal ratings:

• Maternal LEAP (LEAP-M): Cronbach’s alpha values consistently range from $\alpha = .93$ to $.96$. In the seminal validation sample of 306 adolescents (Lum & Phares, 2005), the maternal form demonstrated an alpha of $.95$.
• Paternal LEAP (LEAP-F): Cronbach’s alpha values range from $\alpha = .94$ to $.97$, with an alpha of $.96$ in the original validation cohort.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across all 15 items consistently exceed $.60$, with the majority falling between $.70$ and $.84$, indicating that every item contributes meaningfully and coherently to the overall assessment of parental emotional availability.

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability assessments conducted across short-term intervals confirm that the LEAP captures stable relational perceptions rather than transient, state-dependent affective reactions:

• Over a 2- to 4-week retest interval, the Pearson correlation coefficient was $r = .89$ for the maternal scale and $r = .91$ for the paternal scale ($p < .001$).
• Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) across repeated administrations have consistently surpassed $.85$, confirming high reproducibility and minimal measurement error.

Factor Analysis

During the psychometric development of the LEAP, Lum and Phares conducted both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to evaluate the dimensional integrity of the instrument.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Principal Components Analysis with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations were computed separately for ratings of mothers and fathers:

• Eigenvalues and Scree Test: Across multiple cohorts, inspection of the scree plot and Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) revealed a dominant first factor with an eigenvalue exceeding 9.0 for both parents, accounting for 60% to 68% of the total variance.
• Secondary Factors: Any secondary factors yielded eigenvalues hovering near or below 1.0 and failed to form conceptually distinct or psychometrically stable dimensions upon rotation.
• Factor Loadings: All 15 items demonstrated robust, salient factor loadings on the primary general factor, ranging from $.65$ to $.88$. Items such as “Is emotionally available to me,” “Supports me,” and “Consoles me when I am upset” consistently loaded among the highest, confirming their central status in defining the construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural investigations utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM) framework compared a unidimensional (single-factor) model against multidimensional models (e.g., separating sensitivity, responsiveness, and supportiveness):

• Although a three-factor model can be statistically specified, the latent inter-factor correlations exceed $.85$ to $.92$, indicating severe multicollinearity and confirming that youth do not practically differentiate parental sensitivity from responsiveness or supportiveness.
• The parsimonious single-factor model yields excellent goodness-of-fit indices across diverse populations: $\chi^2 / df < 2.5$, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) $ge .95$, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) $ge .94$, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) $le .058$ ($90% \text{ CI } [.045, .071]$).
• Measurement Invariance: Multiple-group CFAs have demonstrated metric and scalar invariance across biological sex (male vs. female youth) and family structures, indicating that the LEAP items function equivalently across diverse demographic strata.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administration guidelines for the LEAP are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure (LEAP)
• Target Population: Adolescents (ages 11–18) and emerging/young adults (ages 18–25+). Can be adapted for clinical child populations with reading assistance.
• Assessment Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computerized survey, or structured clinical administration.
• Target Figures: Administered as dual rating columns or two successive forms for the Mother (or maternal figure) and Father (or paternal figure).
• Item Count: 15 items per parent (total of 30 ratings if both parents are evaluated).
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes to complete both parent profiles.
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Rarely
  • 3 = Sometimes
  • 4 = Often
  • 5 = Very Often
  • 6 = Always
• Scoring System:
  • All 15 items are positively valenced; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • Total Score Calculation: Sum the item ratings for each parent independently. The theoretical total score ranges from 15 to 90 per parent.
  • Mean Score Calculation: Alternatively, calculate the average item score (sum divided by 15), yielding a score range of 1.0 to 6.0.
  • Score Interpretation: Higher scores reflect greater perceived parental emotional availability. Scores between 15–45 indicate low emotional availability (relational alienation or neglect); 46–69 represent moderate emotional availability; and 70–90 denote high emotional availability (strong perceived warmth, validation, and support).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Lum Emotional Availability of Parents measure was first published in peer-reviewed form in 2005 by Jackie J. Lum and Vicky Phares (with initial developmental presentations dating to 2004). The primary psychometric validation article appeared in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment (Springer Science+Business Media).

Regarding permissions, access, and copyright:

• Research and Educational Use: The LEAP is widely considered an open-access psychometric instrument for non-commercial academic research, institutional evaluation, and clinical research purposes. In accordance with academic fair use, researchers may administer the measure provided proper formal attribution is cited.
• Clinical Practice Use: Clinicians and family practitioners may utilize the scale in direct therapeutic work without paying licensing royalties.
• Commercial Applications: Any commercial deployment, proprietary software integration, or profit-generating publication of the LEAP requires explicit written permission from the copyright holders (Springer / the original authors).
• Inquiries: Inquiries regarding test permissions, scoring matrices, and original research archives can be directed to the Department of Psychology at the University of South Florida or through correspondence with Dr. Vicky Phares.

References

The following academic publications document the development, validation, and theoretical foundations of the LEAP:

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Biringen, Z., & Robinson, J. (1991). Emotional availability in mother-child interactions: A reconceptualization for research. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61(2), 258–271. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079238
• Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969).
• Lum, J. J., & Phares, V. (2005). Assessing the emotional availability of parents. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 27(3), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-005-0637-3
• Lum, J. J., & Phares, V. (2005). Parental emotional availability and adolescent eating disturbances. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(1), 89–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-005-1338-0
• Lum, J. J., & Phares, V. (2013). Lum Emotional Availability of Parents. In C. A. Simmons & P. Lehmann (Eds.), Tools for strengths-based assessment and evaluation (pp. 426–427). Springer Publishing Company.
• Rohner, R. P. (2004). The parental “acceptance-rejection syndrome”: Universal correlates of perceived rejection. American Psychologist, 59(8), 830–840. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.8.830

Items of the Scale