Emotion Socialization Mechanisms Linking Chinese Fathers’, Mothers’, and Children’s Emotion Regulation: A Moderated Mediation Model

Parental reactions to children’s negative emotions, including supportive and unsupportive reactions, are considered to socialize children’s emotion regulation, which is critical to children’s socio-emotional competency. Limited research has investigated how the characteristics of parents, such as parental emotion dysregulation, are associated with their reactions to children’s emotions. Little is known about fathers’ and mothers’ complementary role in alleviating or buffering against the effect of spouses’ reactions on children’s emotion regulation abilities. This study examined these links with 195 Chinese school-age children (M age = 9.15, SD = 1.02) and their biological parents. The findings indicated that parental emotion dysregulation was associated with their supportive reactions to children’s negative emotions and these reactions interacted with the co-caregiver’s emotion dysregulation to exert an effect on children’s emotion regulation. These findings not only highlight the pathway through which parental emotion regulation abilities are transferred to their children but also suggest that fathers and mothers both play distinct roles in socializing children’s emotion regulation. Further, their interaction, rather than paternal or maternal emotion dysregulation per se, appeared to influence children’s emotional competence.