The role of parents in shaping children’s emotion regulation

Written by guest author Michelle Ramos, Ph.D.

In early childhood, parents play a key role in helping children develop emotion regulation skills, the ability to label, understand and manage emotions. This process, known as parental socialization of emotions (PSE), is essential for shaping the way children learn to navigate their emotional world.

PSE is the process by which parents communicate their values ​​regarding emotional behavior, teach children to understand and control their emotions, and model appropriate emotional responses. These cues can occur both indirectly, through the family’s emotional climate and observational learning, and directly, through specific parenting practices, such as the way parents respond to the child’s emotions.

Research shows that supportive parental responses, such as focusing on a child’s problem or emotion, encourage and guide children’s expression and regulation of emotional emotions and are associated with positive adolescent outcomes. On the other hand, restrictive and punitive parental responses focusing on verbal or physical punishment are associated with negative outcomes, including greater risk of social, behavioral, and mental health problems (Hooven et al., 1995; Hurrell et al., 2015; Ramakrishnan et al. . ., 2019).

By understanding how parents help their children cope with emotional challenges, we can gain insight into the early contextual factors that influence emotion regulation. This understanding is crucial because it affects a wide range of children’s outcomes, from social and behavioral functioning to mental health problems, including eating disorders and substance use.

Because our lab is interested in understanding the different ways parents may respond to their young children’s emotions, they were asked to respond to a series of hypothetical scenarios in which the child becomes upset or angry. Parents indicated the extent to which they would respond to each scenario within 6 theoretically meaningful ways of dealing with their child’s negative emotions. Possible responses corresponded to 6 coping strategies that reflect both supportive and unsupportive responses: problem-focused (e.g., finding solutions), emotion-focused (e.g., acknowledging feelings), expressive encouragement (e.g., showing empathy), minimizing ( downplaying). problem), punishing (punishing the child) and distressing (expressing one’s own negative emotions). This helped us explore the range of ways parents deal with their children’s negative emotions and identify 3 different patterns of strategy use:

1. Adaptive support

This group of parents reported the highest levels of use of problem-focused strategies, emotion-focused strategies, and expressive encouragement, and rarely used minimization, punitive responses, or self-expression of concern.

2. Solution-focused response

This group of parents appeared to prioritize problem solving and emotional support and to use low levels of minimization, punishment, and responding to distress. With less emphasis on expressive encouragement, these parents focused more on problem solving and acknowledging emotions, and did not place as much emphasis on emotional expression.

3. Diversified use of strategies

This group used a variety of strategies to respond to the child’s emotional displays. These parents demonstrated high levels of problem- and emotion-focused responses and reported using moderate amounts of expressive encouragement, minimization, punishment, and distress responses.

Using these distinct patterns of emotion-related parenting behaviors, we also wanted to understand how these strategies influenced the child’s subsequent emotion regulation, as well as the parenting factors that may have influenced different strategy uses.

Mothers who express higher levels of positive emotionality in the family atmosphere were more likely to adopt adaptive support strategies, whereas mothers who express lower levels of positive emotionality were more likely to adopt solution-focused response strategies.

Although the overall expression of positive emotionality was low among parents using a solution-focused approach, if these parents did express positive emotions, it predicted better emotion regulation a year later, when the children were 3 years old. This suggests that a balanced approach of focusing on finding a solution while acknowledging the child’s emotions may promote greater emotion regulation as parents model more positive emotional expressions at home.

Because parents are unlikely to strictly stick to one strategy during (or even within!) emotional interaction with their child, it is important to understand how using different strategies can effectively support the healthy development of emotion regulation.

About the guest author: Dr. Michelle Ramos has been participating in the Emotion Development Lab as a post-doc since 2021. Her research focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to differences in how children and adolescents participate in risky behaviors. Her ongoing research focuses on the development of early-life emotion regulation and the role of parenting.

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