“Good enough” parental responsiveness to Children's sadness: Links to psychosocial functioning

Parent emotion regulation socializes children's adaptive physiological regulation

“…RSA augmentation was an adaptive pattern of responding to the recovery phase of the structured disappointment task (e.g., Davis et al, 2016, Sulik et al, 2015. Our results extend previous Although we hypothesized that better parental regulation would predict both less distress when children were with their parents and greater RSA augmentation in this recovery context, we found the Castro et al, 2015;Morris et al, 2007;Poon et al, 2017), and that emotion socialization happens via both indirect (by modeling emotion regulation skills) and direct (by coaching children to use emotion regulation strategies) pathways (Thompson & Meyer, 2007).…”

“…This is a novel finding, as many studies of parental emotion socialization have narrowly focused on behavioral measures of emotional expression and language. The behavioral approach has been fruitful, showing that young children learn how to regulate their emotions from interacting with their parents (e.g., Castro et al, ; Morris et al, ; Poon et al, ), and that emotion socialization happens via both indirect (by modeling emotion regulation skills) and direct (by coaching children to use emotion regulation strategies) pathways (Thompson & Meyer, ). However, little research has examined the combination of direct and indirect aspects of parental emotion socialization, and this is the first study we know of to relate this interplay to children's adaptive regulatory functioning.…”

“…Parents who validate and label their own emotions and help their children manage emotions in a constructive way tend to have children with relatively high levels of regulatory skills (Lunkenheimer, Shields, & Cortina, ), and parents’ emotion coaching has been associated with better emotion understanding and regulation among children (Cunningham, Kliewer, & Garner, ). Although biological functioning is a critical factor in the development of adaptive emotional functioning (Calkins & Keane, ; Calkins, Graziano, & Keane, ), most work examining how parents’ regulatory abilities influence children has focused on behavioral measures like parents’ emotional expression and language (e.g., Castro, Halberstadt, Lozada, & Craig, ; Morris et al, ; Poon, Zeman, Miller‐Slough, Sanders, & Crespo, ), or on concordant physiological patterns between parents and children (e.g., Creaven, Skowron, Hughes, Howard, & Loken, ; Lunkenheimer et al, ; Moore et al, ). Thus, a more comprehensive assessment of parents’ regulatory abilities using both biological and behavioral indices is needed.…”

A Conceptual Model of the Intergenerational Transmission of Emotion Dysregulation in Mothers with a History of Childhood Maltreatment

“…Another limitation is that this model pertains to the transmission of emotion dysregulation amongst mothers with a history of child maltreatment. More research is beginning to examine the unique influence of fathers in the process of ES (e.g., Gerhardt et al, 2020) and despite widespread recognition that ES occurs within the family system (Morris et al, 2007), there is a paucity of literature on how mothers and fathers socialize children's development in an interactive way (Poon et al, 2017). A study by McElwain and colleagues (2007) found that when one parent reported low levels of supportive ES, greater support by the other parent was related to higher levels of emotional understanding in children.…”

“…However, when one parent reported high levels of supportive ES, high levels of support from the other parent was actually associated with less optimal functioning. As such, rather than supporting an additive model wherein higher levels of support yield better outcomes, a growing body of evidence supports a divergence model in which children's psychosocial adjustment is facilitated by exposure to a diverse range of parental responses characterized by varying levels of maternal and paternal supportiveness (Miller et al, 2015;Miller-Slough et al, 2018;Poon et al, 2017).…”