Parents’ responses to their children’s emotional expression

The way in which parents regulate their own emotions plays an important role in the emotional development of their children and this may be compromised when parents experience psychological distress. Bertie and colleagues (2021) investigated this further in a non-clinical sample of parents.

Emotion regulation in parents

Supportive responses to children’s emotional expression facilitate appropriate emotional expression, while non-supportive responses may contribute to poor emotional competence, social coping and behaviour.

Parents need to be able to positively manage their own emotions to be able to effectively help their children regulate their emotions. Parents with difficulties in emotion regulation are more likely to respond in a non-supportive way to their children’s negative emotions. The emotional regulations strategies used influence parents’ responses to their children’s emotions. Lower use of cognitive reappraisal (changing the way one thinks about a situation) and higher use of expressive suppression (hiding or reducing emotion-expressive behaviour) have been linked to higher parental negative expression and lower use of supportive responses to children’s emotions.

The impact of psychological distress on emotional regulation

Parents’ psychological distress is a risk factor for poor emotion regulation and non-supportive responding to children’s emotions. Parents experiencing psychological distress may find it more difficult to return to a calmer state and to respond to their children’s negative emotions in appropriate and adaptive ways. Parental difficulties with emotional regulation have been linked to higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression.

However, little is known about how subclinical levels of psychological distress influence parents’ emotional regulation and their responses to their children’s emotional expression. To understand this further Bertie and colleagues conducted a study to examine the extent to which psychological distress affects the way in which parents respond to their children’s expression of negative emotions and whether this relationship is influenced by the emotion regulation strategies used.

About the study

Australian parents (N = 307) with children aged three to 10 completed an online survey, which included measures of symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, and use of the emotional regulation strategies emotional suppression and cognitive reappraisal. Use of supportive and non-supportive parental responses was also measured via hypothetical scenarios related to children’s expression of negative emotion.

Study findings

Parents who reported higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress reported more frequent use of expressive suppression and less frequent use of cognitive reappraisal as emotion regulation strategies. These results suggested that non-adaptive emotion regulation may be present even at subclinical levels of emotional distress, and parents experiencing psychological distress may benefit from emotion-regulation skills training.

There was evidence that emotion-regulation strategies mediated the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms and supportive responses. This mediation effect was also observed for non-supportive responses. Parents with symptoms of depression were less likely to engage in the supportive response of cognitive reappraise emotional encounters with their children, while parents experiencing stress were more likely to engage in the non-supportive response of suppressing their emotions. There was no evidence of mediation in the relationship between anxiety symptoms and non-supportive responses. That is, parents experiencing anxiety were not more or less likely to use either of the two emotional regulation strategies measured than non-anxious parents.

Implications

The findings highlight the value in teaching adaptive emotion regulation strategies in parenting interventions. Learning these skills can help parents both reduce their psychological distress and improve their responses to their children’s expression of negative emotions.

doi.org/10.1080/00049530.2021.1884001