Child Regulation of Negative Emotions and Depressive Symptoms: The Moderating Role of Parental Emotion Socialization

Parent responses to children's emotional expressions play a large role in the way that children learn to regulate and cope with emotions. Families in the current study reported on child emotion regulation and depressive symptoms and parent responses to child expression of anger and sadness. Results suggest that unsupportive parental responses (e.g., dismissing, invalidating) to sadness and anger are associated with child emotion dysregulation and poor coping, as well as greater depressive symptoms.