Current Themes in Understanding Children’s Emotion Regulation as Developing from within the Parent-Child Relationship

Abstract

A large existing literature has established that children’s emotion regulation (ER) behaviors and capacities emerge from within the parent-child relationship. This review identified very recently published studies that exemplify contemporary themes in this area of research. Specifically, new research suggests that the influence of fathers, above and beyond that of mothers, becomes more pronounced across development. Further, culture influences how parents socialize emotion and how specific parenting behaviors relate to children’s developing ER. Lastly, studies find child-elicited effects, such that children’s ER predicts parents’ emotion socialization and other relevant behaviors. We suggest several future directions, including understanding the nature of situations that elicit ER patterns, as well as both expanding upon and integrating the areas highlighted in the review.

It is well-established that emotion regulation (ER) behaviors and capacities emerge from experiences within the early parent-child relationship, with previous theory and empirical research supporting the attachment relationship (typically with the mother) and specific parenting behaviors as foundations of ER development from infancy onwards [1,2]. While acknowledging that ER development in the parent-child relationship is a nuanced literature that cannot be exhaustively encompassed here, this review covers two themes emerging from very recent research in this area (Figure 1). First is the increased acknowledgement of contextual factors, like parent-partner (mother versus father) and culture, in the development of ER within the parent-child relationship. Second, parents do not unidirectionally influence children’s ER. We review new studies examining how children’s ER influences parenting behavior. Within both of these themes, recent research focuses on emotion socialization (see Box 1) as the parenting construct of relevance to children’s ER. We conclude with suggestions for future research that will continue to refine our understanding of ER development.

Figure 1.

A pictoral representation of current themes in child emotion regulation research. Children’s emotion regulation development occurs within the context of the parent-child relationship, which may be influenced by both the specific parent partner as well as the culture(s) in which the family resides. Further, children’s emotion regulation also influences the parent, so this relation is best conceptualized as bidirectional.

Box 1.

Emotion socialization is the process by which parents communicate values surrounding the display and management of emotions through direct dialogue about, modeling of, and reactions to children’s displays of emotions [32]. Subsequently, children learn how to regulate their emotions in line with these values. In European American samples, discussion and general familial acceptance of the expression of emotion is associated with improved emotion regulation capabilities in children [33,34,35,36,37,38] These adaptive parental reactions to emotion are termed supportive and emotion-coaching behaviors throughout this article. Within these broader categories are problem-solving responses, which seek to determine a solution and provide another example of supportive emotion-coaching behaviors. Explanation-oriented responses are a type of supportive emotion socialization behavior found in Indian samples that aim to help the child understand the feelings and intent of others to facilitate interpersonal relationships [19]. Nonsupportive emotion socialization practices include minimizing, punitive, and critical reactions to children’s emotion displays. Such emotion-dismissive parenting is associated with maladaptive ER capabilities in children and predicts poorer coping outcomes and future dysregulation [39,40].

Parent-Partner as a Context of ER Development

Unequivocally, parents play a role in the development of ER. Recent studies have focused on how mothers and fathers independently and conjointly influence ER. These suggest that both parents make unique contributions to children’s ER development and these distinctions become more apparent as children age.

Few differences exist between how fathers and mothers impact ER in infancy. Infants often rely on their caregivers for assistance in regulating their affective experience [1,3]. When the caregiver is uncharacteristically unresponsive, the infant must attempt to self-regulate. When either mothers or fathers were instructed to be unresponsive, 3 to7-month-olds employed similar strategies to regulate their emotions (e.g., looking to the parent, distraction, self-soothing), and these strategies proved equally effective for reducing negative affect over a three second period with each parent [4]. However, when comparing infants’ displays of negative affect to parental unresponsiveness across the 3, 5, and 7-month assessments, reductions in negative affect across that time period were only found for paternal unresponsiveness. Regardless of age, 3 to 7-month old infants found maternal unresponsiveness consistently distressing. A previous study by the same research group investigated the regulatory strategies used by 20-month-olds when their parents were instructed to remain unresponsive for 90 seconds when the toddler was introduced to a frustrating toy [5]. Consistent with the younger sample, the regulation strategy used was similar when with mothers and fathers. Further, when toddlers used a parent-centered approach to regulate their frustration, negative affect displays lasted longer with mothers than with fathers. Taken together, these studies suggest that while similar regulatory strategies are used when in the presence of an unresponsive mother and father, maternal unresponsiveness is slightly more distressing. Particularly in early infancy, caregivers are crucial in helping infants to regulate distress [3]. Infants spend more time with their mothers in their first year [6], and it is during this time that infants develop the ability to discriminate between faces and voices [3]. Perhaps distress results from infants’ violated expectations of their mothers as external sources of ER, coupled with infants’ evolving abilities to identify their mothers’ characteristic features.

These small cross-parent differences in infancy become more pronounced by childhood. Mothers engage in more supportive emotion-coaching behaviors than fathers in reaction their children’s negative emotions during a teaching task [7]. Perhaps surprising, a recent model by Fosco and Grych [8] proposed that when considering family emotional climate and interparental conflict, only maternal supportive responses to children’s emotion displays related directly to ER development. Others [9] found that positive paternal influences on children’s behaviors are observed only in families where the mother-father relationship is characterized by low conflict. Together these findings suggest that paternal behaviors may be absorbed in the general family climate whereas maternal behaviors maintain unique influences for children’s ER. In addition, maternal ER strategies related to their 9 to 19-year-old children’s ER strategies whereas paternal strategies did not [10]. Given this recent research, it appears that mothers may influence the development of ER more than fathers in this age range. It is important to consider the intergenerational context when speculating about the mechanisms underlying these differences. Research supports the notion that parents discuss emotions more with their daughters than their sons [11]. Perhaps mothers are more comfortable discussing emotions with their own children because their parents discussed emotions more in their own childhood and so were socialized to accept emotional expression as more typical than fathers.

By middle childhood, paternal reactions to emotion displays appear influential in the development of gender-stereotypical emotions. The extant literature has demonstrated that fathers are more supportive than mothers of sadness in their daughters and anger in their sons [11,12]. A recent study extended these findings to spousal-report and found that mothers perceive fathers to be more supportive of their daughters’ rather than their sons’ sadness displays [13]. Given that fathers generally engage in less emotion socialization with their children than do mothers [11], it is possible that when fathers are supportive of gender-stereotypical emotions this is particularly salient to their children. This appears to be true for stereotypically male emotions as well. When fathers, but not mothers, are unsupportive of their children’s anger displays, children are at an increased risk for psychopathology [14]. In addition, children of fathers who model dysregulation and hostility are more likely to demonstrate externalizing problems in a classroom environment [15]. Clearly, parent-partner has a significant impact on ER development, and as research evolves, the nuances of these parental influences should be investigated.

From the above findings, it should not be assumed that mothers are the only agents by which children develop ER. It is clear that both mothers and fathers are similarly influential in infancy and speaks to the importance of the paternal relationship for developing these foundational ER capabilities. The above review does suggest that mothers and fathers influence emotion regulation in unique domains. Particularly, paternal influences should be explicitly considered in interventions for children who present with gender-stereotypical emotion dysregulation.

Culture as a Context for ER Development

Culture influences individuals’ values, beliefs, and practices, and this is certainly evident in the domain of emotions and their regulation. Likely, the mechanism by which culture influences the development of ER is parental communication of emotion-related values to their children as part of emotion socialization.

Children’s ER differs across varying social and cultural groups. As one recent example, older children and young adolescents in the United States reported more restraint in expressing and regulating sadness than children in Ghana or Kenya [16]. Further differences found between the African countries and between rural versus urban areas within Ghana demonstrate that in addition to broad group differences (e.g., American versus African children), ER should be understood within nuanced contexts (e.g., different regions within a country) to understand how culture impacts parent-child processes. Physiological correlates of ER may also differ. Children from China and the United States demonstrated different relations between aspects of effortful control and cortisol reactivity and regulation (i.e., inhibitory control related to lower cortisol reactivity and steeper recovery for U.S. but not Chinese children, while attentional focusing related to steeper reactivity for Chinese but not U.S. children), but their overall cortisol response was not different [17]. It is therefore not a matter of having a different physiology, but rather that cultural values may impact how emotion-relevant physiology adapts to social demands and expectations.

Parental emotion socialization relates to children’s ER across different socioeconomic levels and cultures [18,19]. However, the same parental behavior may reflect different values depending on the culture and thus relate to unique ER outcomes in diverse groups. The consequences of emotion socialization practices for children’s ER development, rather than mean-level differences in emotion socialization, highlight the influence of culture when comparing majority to minority groups within North America. Bowie and colleagues [20] found few mean-level differences in emotion coaching among African American (AA), European American (EA), and Multiracial families. However, higher levels of parental emotion coaching related to children’s lower levels of emotion overcontrol (emotion overcontrol was operationalized as internalizing symptoms) in AA and Multiracial, but not EA, families. Lower levels of modeling of dysregulated emotion in AA, but not EA, parents also predicted children’s lower emotional overcontrol. Perhaps this reflects values of control over strong emotions that characterize AA more than EA parents [20]. Similarly, lower modeling of positive expressions did not relate to ER difficulties for Asian American emerging adults, although it did for EA and AA emerging adults [21]. The authors surmised that cultural norms surrounding emotion expression determine when parental modeling of emotion relates to variation in children’s developing ER.

Further, emotion socialization constructs developed with EA families in North American may not be equally relevant across other cultures. As one example, explanation responses were more relevant than problem-solving responses to negative emotions for mothers in India, as compared to U.S. mothers [22]. Explanation-oriented emotion socialization, but not problem-solving, subsequently related to higher adaptive ER in Indian children [19], perhaps because of the emphasis on relationships rather than individual outcomes. Raval, Raval, Salvina and colleagues [22] found further differences between families living in the “old-city” versus suburban areas, such that mothers living in the old city (and thus more aligned with traditional values of interdependence) reported more negative emotional reactions and fewer emotion-focused behavioral responses in relation to children’s anger and sadness than both suburban Indian and U.S. mothers. This again suggests the importance of considering nuances within broader cultures, such as region and fluctuation in adherence to traditional values. From this recent work it is clear that in clinical as well as research contexts, the cultural values behind emotion socialization practices should be considered. In clinical work, especially, cultural values should guide interventions that target parent behaviors in order to improve children’s ER capabilities.

Children’s Emotion Regulation as an Influence on Parents

Consistent with the developmental psychopathology perspective that children are active contributors to their own caregiving environment [23], contemporary studies have yielded increasing evidence that children’s emotion displays and ER strategies feed back into the ER-relevant parenting they receive.

In toddlers, specific types of regulatory behaviors in novel situations predicted change in mothers’ emotion socialization over the course of one year [24]. Specifically, when male toddlers engaged in higher levels of caregiver-focused regulation (seeking contact with their mothers) in low-threat yet novel situations, mothers demonstrated decreased nonsupportive socialization (e.g., telling the child he is making a big deal out of nothing or to “get over it”) over the next year. The authors suggested that this could indicate that mothers expect their young boys to rely on them to manage negative emotions more so than girls, so adhering to these expectations lowers nonsupportive responses. Adaptive (e.g., verbal expression of emotion) versus maladaptive (e.g., whining, yelling) ER in older (7- to 12-year-old) children has also recently been found to predict supportive versus nonsupportive emotion socialization, respectively [25]. The reverse was true as well, highlighting the reciprocal nature of these interactions.

Other recent studies have highlighted how children can elicit overcontrol from their parents, which has previously been theorized to interfere with their development of independent ER in the face of stress [26]. For example, toddlers displaying a pattern of “dysregulated fear,” such that they show consistent fear across situations varying from low to high threat, appear to be at increased risk for anxiety [27,28]. A recent study found that dysregulated fear related to toddlers receiving increased maternal protective parenting responses when they solicited help, and this type of protective parenting maintained risk for anxiety across early childhood [29]. This research highlights the importance of understanding the eliciting context of the situation (here, low versus high threat) when determining the appropriateness of the emotion display and perhaps reflecting regulation difficulties, as toddlers who only displayed fear in a high-threat context did not experience the same parent-child dynamics or risk for anxiety. In clinical settings, the nature of the eliciting context could be considered in diagnosing ER-related problems like depression and anxiety to understand atypical behavior. When working with parents in a clinical setting, this work would suggest examining how children’s existing ER may be influencing parenting behaviors that are targeted for intervention. Clinicians may need to consider how children’s current ER strategies or patterns may impede treatment efforts that target parenting. If children’s ER strategies elicit maladaptive parenting, clinicians would benefit from acknowledging and working with parents’ difficulties in changing their responses and perhaps targeting the dynamic parent-child interaction rather than one partner in isolation.

Conclusions and Suggested Future Directions

Recent research has contributed exciting advancements, but many questions remain in understanding how ER develops from or affects the parent-child relationship. Studies examining paternal influences independently or in the context of maternal influence on children’s ER, as well as cultural influences on how parents influence their children’s ER should be extended. The former should be expanded to understand how ER may develop in other family structures beyond those with a mother-father parental subsystem. For the latter, it is increasingly clear that understanding nuances within broader cultures based on geographical region, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and race, will be important. Also, it will be important to understand how being from a minority culture within a majority culture influences parents’ socialization in ways that are not at play when doing cross-cultural research with different majority cultures. Integrating these areas with other influences on ER such as biology and temperament, as well as with each other (e.g., studying the influence of parent-partner across cultures) may hone our understanding of individual differences in developmental patterns.

Further, situational context was also a feature of several of the reviewed studies that warrants further consideration within the parent-child relationship. For example, the intensity of the fear-eliciting context was relevant for understanding when specific ER strategies predicted nonsupportive emotion socialization [24] and for defining fear regulation difficulties [27,28] that influenced parent-child interactions [29]. Situational properties have also been used to understand context-inappropriate anger [30], but this has yet to be examined within the parent-child relationship. Moreover, another aspect of context, parental involvement in laboratory tasks, has been shown to relate to differential displays of emotion regulation behaviors [31]. This area of research may be uniquely suited to experimental manipulations that can provide more support for causal inferences. Integrating each of these directions with what is already well-established within the parent-child relationship will further propel knowledge about the development of ER.

Finally, we suggest that researchers continue to test the bidirectional relations between parenting and children’s ER in a truly developmental manner. Future research may aim to specify the developmental periods when parental emotion socialization is most relevant for ER and vice versa, and whether this is universal or influenced by individual differences. Relatedly, a considerable gap remains in our understanding of how behavioral indices of emotion regulation in childhood predict cognitive patterns of ER in adulthood. Future research would be particularly warranted in examining how parents may influence this developmental process.

Highlights.

• Emotion regulation develops from within the parent-child relationship.

• Fathers’ influence becomes more pronounced across development.

• Culture influences parenting relevant to emotion regulation.

• Children’s emotion regulation also affects parents, suggesting bidirectionality.