Longitudinal Associations Between Maternal Emotion Regulation, Maternal Emotion-Related Socialization Behaviors, and Children’s Emotion Regulation

Parental emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs)—including parents’ reactions to their children’s emotions, emotional expressiveness, and conversations with their children about emotions—shape children’s emotion regulation (ER), a multifaceted construct comprising cognitive, behavioral, and physiological processes for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotions to accomplish one’s goals. Parents’ ER may affect both their engagement in ERSBs and their children’s ER, but longitudinal research delineating the specific aspects of parental ER that are most relevant for different ERSBs and unique components of children’s ER is limited. A racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of mothers and their 6- to 8-year-olds (n = 98) completed three lab visits, six months apart. Maternal ER, ESBs, and child ER were assessed with multimethod batteries at each visit. Although specific findings varied based on whether autoregressive controls were included, findings indicated that there were longitudinal associations among unique components of maternal ER, maternal ERBs, and child ER, as hypothesized. Generally, there were positive associations between the negative emotion/dysregulation dimensions of maternal ER, maternal ERSBs, and child ER. There were also positive associations between the coaching/coping dimensions of these constructs. Altogether, the present study’s rigorous testing of the intergenerational transmission of ER through maternal ERSBs highlights key next steps for basic and translational research aiming to support parent and child emotional wellbeing.