Publication year
2015
Citation Title
Child regulation of negative emotions and depressive symptoms: The moderating role of parental emotion socialization.
Journal Name
Journal of Child and Family Studies
Journal Volume
24
Issue Number
2
Page Numbers
402-415
DOI
10.1007/s10826-013-9850-y
Summary
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.
Key Findings
Unsupportive responses to children’s emotions of sadness and anger by both mothers and fathers was associated with greater child emotion dysregulation.
Unsupportive responses to sadness by mothers and to anger by fathers, but not vice versa, were associated with increased child depressive symptoms.
For children whose parents were unsupportive of expressions of anger or sadness, high levels of emotion dysregulation and poor coping were associated with greater depressive symptoms.
Implications for Military Professionals
Attend trainings about parenting in military families to better understand parenting within the military culture and how it may impact military parents’ responses to child emotional expression
Collaborate with programs for military families to promote parent education on youth emotion socialization for all families
Implications for Program Leaders
Educate military parents about how their responses to their child’s emotions may impact emotion regulation and about positive ways to respond to child emotional expression
Offer workshops for military children on healthy emotion regulation skills and coping
Implications for Policy Makers
Promote the development of education programs for military parents on youth emotional development and socialization
Recommend education for professionals working with military families about normative emotional expression in military families
Methods
Families with elementary school children in a Southeastern U.S. city were recruited via letters.
Children completed questionnaires about depressive symptoms and their parents’ responses to emotions; parents completed questionnaires regarding their child’s emotions and coping.
Associations between unsupportive parent emotional responses, gender, children’s anger and sadness dysregulation and coping, and children’s depressive symptoms were examined.
Participants
Participant families included 84 elementary school children, who were 57% male, had an average age of 10.1 years (SD = 1.00), and had two parents in the home.
Children identified as primarily White (84%), Black (6%), or Asian-American (2%), and parents identified as primarily White (86%), Black (6%), or Latino (3%).
Parents were biological (92%), adoptive (4%), or step- (4%) parents of the child participant.
Limitations
Due to the cross-sectional nature of the study, the direction of the associations cannot be determined.
Researchers combined several subscales of parent responses to child emotion into a single variable measuring unsupportive parenting responses, which may have over-simplified findings.
Only two-parent families were recruited, and results may not generalize to families with other structures, such as single-parent families.
Avenues for Future Research
Continue to examine parent responses to child expression of other negative emotions (e.g., jealousy, guilt) and the impact on child emotion regulation and coping
Conduct a similar prospective longitudinal study to explore the direction of effects
Examine the effect of parent support of emotional expression in adolescence as risk for depression increases among youth during this period
Focus
Civilian
Target Population
Population Focus
Abstract
Research indicates that parents’ methods of emotion socialization impact the development of their children’s emotion expressivity, which, in turn, is implicated in the emergence of internalizing symptoms. Relatively little research, however, has examined the emotion socialization behaviors that mothers and fathers use to socialize their children’s emotion regulation with respect to how these behaviors may differentially predict depressive symptoms in their sons and daughters. In the current study, the relations among these three variables were investigated by having mothers and fathers report on their children’s dysregulation and regulation coping of anger and sadness. Sons and daughters reported on their perceived receipt of parents’ responses to their anger and sadness expressivity, as well as their own depressive symptoms. Correlational analyses revealed that unsupportive responses to emotional expressivity were related to greater child emotion dysregulation, poorer emotion coping, and depressive symptoms. Moderation analyses revealed that, for both mothers and fathers, at high levels of unsupportive responses to emotions, children were perceived to have more anger dysregulation, less anger coping, less sadness coping, and more depressive symptoms. Regression analyses indicated that mothers’ unsupportive responses to sadness and fathers’ unsupportive responses to anger are associated with their children’s depressive symptoms. These findings support the notion that mothers and fathers play unique roles in children’s emotion regulation skills and subsequent risk for depression.
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