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Children’s Anxious Characteristics Predict how their Parents Socialize Emotions

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Abstract

Emotion socialization by parents contributes to children’s trajectories of healthy and unhealthy emotional development, but there has been little research into the determinants and development of parental emotion socialization. We examined whether young children’s anxious characteristics, including expressed anxiety with peers and low basal respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), predicted changes in mothers’ and fathers’ emotion socialization over the subsequent year. Using regression and regions of significance analyses, we observed that children’s expressed anxiety moderated the stability of mothers’ and fathers’ supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization, primarily in ways that would be likely to maintain or exacerbate children’s social anxiety. For example, mothers’ highly fretful and less supportive responses were more stable when children had been more anxious with peers. Basal RSA moderated the stability of fathers’ punitive responses to children’s anxious and sad emotions, and directly predicted changes in mothers’ neglect of children’s anxious and sad emotions, and negative and positive feelings about children’s social withdrawal. These effects of children’s characteristics on parents’ emotions and behaviors support bidirectional and transactional models of the socialization of children’s anxiety and internalizing problems, and identify aspects of emotion socialization by parents that could be amenable to intervention.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec, and Concordia University. We would like to thank members of the Healthy Emotions, Relationships, and Development (HERD) Lab at UC Davis and the Affective and Behavioural Competence Development (ABCD) Lab at Concordia University and the families who participated.

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  1. Psychology, Center for Mind & Brain, University of California, Davis, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA, 95618, USA

    Paul D. Hastings

  2. Department of Psychology, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA

    Jessica S. Grady

  3. Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, Canada

    Lindsey E. Barrieau

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  1. Paul D. Hastings
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  2. Jessica S. Grady
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Correspondence to Paul D. Hastings.

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This project was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Concordia University, Montreal Quebec.

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All parents provided informed consent for their own and their child's participation. All daycare and preschool instructors provided informed consent for the observers' presence in the classroom.

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Hastings, P.D., Grady, J.S. & Barrieau, L.E. Children’s Anxious Characteristics Predict how their Parents Socialize Emotions. J Abnorm Child Psychol 47, 1225–1238 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-018-0481-z

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