Mothers' and Fathers' Responses to Children's Negative Emotions: Family and Physiological Correlates

How parents respond when their children are angry, sad, or fearful is a direct form of emotion socialization that communicates parental expectations about the expression and regulation of emotion. Emotionally supportive parents validate children's emotional expressions and teach them strategies that are useful for reducing emotional arousal, such as refocusing their attention or identifying solutions to problems (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). When parents minimize, reprimand, or get angry when children display negative emotions, children recognize that they should suppress their expression of negative emotions, but they do not learn strategies for regulating them (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996). In fact, responding negatively to children's distress can actually heighten their arousal, which in turn leads to increasing negative emotionality and regulatory problems over time (Calkins, 2002; Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007; Scaramella, Sohr-Preston, Mirabile, Robison, & Callahan, 2007). The extant research largely focuses on mothers' emotion socialization even though fathers' parenting uniquely contributes to children's emotional functioning (McDowell & Parke, 2005; McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). Despite the burgeoning evidence for the role of fathers, research exploring the factors that account for individual differences in both mothers' and fathers' emotion-related parenting practices is scarce. On the basis of the fact that family and individual characteristics are considered key determinants of parenting behavior (Belsky, 1984; Eisenberg et al., 1998), in this study I explored whether family processes and parents' physiological regulation were correlates of mothers' and fathers' reactions to children's negative emotions.Family Systems and Parental Emotion SocializationFamilies are often conceptualized as systems, composed of hierarchically interrelated subsystems (e.g., individuals, parent-child subsystems, the coparenting subsystem) characterized by organized patterns of interaction (Minuchin, 1988). Certain family processes, such as differences in dynamics across subsystems or the interrelations between subsystems, are evident only when multiple family members are assessed (Volling, Kolak, & Blandon, 2009). Using a within-family approach, which included the mother, father, and two children, I explored the variation and interrelations in emotion socialization across the mother-child and father-child subsystems for two children in the same family.Parents' behavior with one child can differ from their behavior with their other children, and these within-parent differences can be examined by including two children from the same family. For example, one study found only modest correlations between parents' reported negativity with two different children (Deater-Deckard, 1996). Variability in parenting across siblings has also been found for positivity. Specifically, during a clean-up task that can be challenging for young children mothers and fathers exchanged more shared positive affect with their preschool child versus their toddler child (Volling, Blandon, & Kolak, 2006). Moreover, developmental factors play a key role in the socialization of emotion (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). Across early childhood, negative emotionality generally decreases, and children's ability to regulate their emotions improves (Calkins, Gill, Johnson, & Smith, 1999; Cole et al., 2011; Kopp, 1989). As a result, parents may find it easier to teach preschool- and kindergarten-age children strategies for regulating their negative emotions. Alternatively, parents may expect older children to express and regulate their emotions in socially appropriate ways and respond more punitively or aversively when they do not. These differences in children's emotional development may be accompanied by differences in how parents respond to children's negative emotions as well as divergent correlates of mothers' and fathers' direct emotion socialization strategies; therefore, I conducted separate models for the older and younger child. …