Family stress and parental responses to children’s negative emotions: Tests of the spillover, crossover, and compensatory hypotheses.

Abstract

The relations between 4 sources of family stress (marital dissatisfaction, home chaos, parental depressive symptoms, and job role dissatisfaction) and the emotion socialization practice of mothers' and fathers' responses to children's negative emotions were examined. Participants included 101 couples with 7-year-old children. Dyadic analyses were conducted using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model and relations were tested in terms of the spillover, crossover, and compensatory hypotheses. Results suggest that measures of family stress relate to supportive and nonsupportive parental responses, though many of these relations differ by parent gender. The results are discussed in terms of the 3 theoretical hypotheses, all of which are supported to some degree depending on the family stressor examined. Keywords emotion socialization; family stress; parental responses to children's negative emotions; parent genderCoping with a negative emotion, such as sadness, anger, or fear, is a more developmentally difficult task for children than coping with a positive emotion (Ramsden & Hubbard, 2002). Until children have learned how to cope with and regulate their negative feelings, it is important for parents to assist children in handling these experiences. In their responses to their children's negative emotions, parents are providing valuable information to their children about Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jackie A. Nelson, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402. janelso3@uncg.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Fam Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 October 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript appropriate emotional displays and successful coping strategies. Parent responses to children's negative emotions have been described as one of the most important methods of direct emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998).Parents vary in the ways they respond to negative emotions, and their responses can be described as either supportive or nonsupportive (Eisenberg et al., 1998;Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002). Supportive responses by parents invite children to explore their feelings by encouraging the child to express emotions or helping the child understand and cope with an emotion-eliciting situation. Nonsupportive responses, such minimizing the child's emotional experience, punishing the child, or becoming distressed by the child's display, send messages to the child that the display of negative emotions is not appropriate or acceptable. Supportive parental responses to children's negative emotions have been found to be related to aspects of emotional and social competence including children's emotion understanding and friendship quality (McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). By contrast, parental nonsupportive or suppressive responses have been linked to stored negative affect in the child and disorgan...

Links Between Maternal and Child Psychopathology Symptoms: Mediation Through Child Emotion Regulation and Moderation Through Maternal Behavior

“…The expressive encouragement, problem-focused responses, and emotion-focused reactions subscales were combined to form a composite measure of mothers' supportive reactions to children's negative emotion expression (a = .90). The scales of the CCNES have been successfully combined in this way in previous work [52,53].…”

Observed sensitivity during family interactions and cumulative risk: A study of multiple dyads per family.

“…Analogous spillover processes have been observed for structural family risks. That is, parents who report higher levels of marital dissatisfaction and household chaos also report being less supportive and responsive to their children's negative emotions (Nelson et al, 2009). …”

Emotional aspects of childhood career development: importance and future agenda

“…Parents' work experiences and emotions also impact children's emotional selfregulation, work orientation and later careers s. Parents' dissatisfaction with work can increase the spouse's nonsupport for the child's negative emotional expression, thus conditioning his/her effective emotional self-regulation (Nelson, O'Brien, Blankson, Calkins, & Keane, 2009). Parents' unemployment can also increase the expression of negative emotions towards work at home (McLoyd, 1989;Nurmi, Salmela-Aro, & Koivisto, 2002), which might constitute a risk factor for the child's development of negative work-related emotions and poor emotional self-regulation (McLoyd, 1989).…”