Abstract
There is a well-established effect of caregiver responses to child emotions on child emotion regulation development. However, targeted family interventions require knowledge of how caregivers regulate their own (emotion regulation; ER) and their child’s (emotion socialization strategies) emotions during daily parent-child interactions, and how contextual variables influence perceived ER and socialization success. This study uses ecological momentary assessment methods (Nparticipants = 197; 3 surveys per day over 7 days) and latent class analysis to model daily ER and socialization strategies used by caregivers of preschool-aged children in daily life. Results indicated that perceived regulation success was highest for caregivers in ER and socialization profiles characterized by frequent endorsement of “no regulation.” However, ER and socialization profiles characterized by high diversity (e.g., flexibility) in strategies were most successful for regulating the emotions of children with high emotional lability and for regulating caregiver emotions at timepoints when caregivers endorsed experiencing a negative emotion, respectively. Thus, results of this study suggest that competence with diverse ER and socialization strategies and flexible application of strategies across situations may be particularly beneficial for caregivers managing difficult or variable emotions in themselves and their child.