Parents’ emotion socialization behaviors in response to preschool-aged children’s justified and unjustified negative emotions

Abstract

Parental socialization of children’s negative emotions is believed to contribute to children’s emotional development, with supportive, process-oriented responses (e.g., explicit acknowledgment of emotional expression and emotion processing) providing opportunities for children to experience and develop adaptive emotion regulation strategies for negative emotions. On the other hand, non-supportive, outcome-oriented responses (e.g., minimizing or punishing children for negative emotional expressions) tend to undermine such opportunities. Less clear, however, is the degree to which parents’ own emotional and cognitive processes influence their emotion socialization behaviors. In particular, the perceived justifiability of children’s negative emotions may be an important factor for parents’ socialization behaviors as parents may only attend to emotional displays that they feel are reasonable. Using a sample of 234 mothers and fathers (parents of 146 unique preschool aged children), we examined the degree to which parents reported: (1) feeling specific emotions as a function of whether they viewed children’s negative emotional expressions; (2) engaging in emotion socialization behaviors as a function of whether they viewed children’s negative emotions. Last, we examined whether parents’ reported emotions were related to their behaviors. For caregivers’ emotions and behaviors, we examined whether patterns differed as a function of whether the children’s emotions were perceived as justified or unjustified. Parents were more likely to report feeling emotions such as anger and frustration when they viewed children’s negative emotions as unjustified relative to justified, and for these unjustified negative emotions, anger and frustration were related to more outcome-oriented behaviors. Emotions such as sadness and guilt, however, were related to more process-oriented behaviors, regardless of whether parents felt children’s negative emotions were justified or unjustified. Findings highlight the interrelatedness of emotional and cognitive processes within the parenting context and their potential influence on emotion socialization behaviors.