Abstract
Contemporary Chinese society blends traditional and new views of children’s emotions and social behavior. Research shows that family functioning and parents’ supportive emotion socialization benefit children’s social competence. Family functioning may influence parent-child interactions, thus we expected both direct and indirect (through emotion socialization) relations of family functioning with children’s social competence, indexed as prosocial and problem behavior. We explored parent gender and child gender differences. Participants were 365 mothers and 204 fathers of 5- to 10-year-old children from central and eastern China who completed online questionnaires. Structural Equation Modeling results showed that for both mothers and fathers, better family functioning related to more supportive and less nonsupportive emotion socialization responses. Moreover, family functioning showed an indirect influence on children’s problem behavior via parental nonsupportive responses (better family functioning related to lower nonsupportive responses, which related to lower problem behavior). For mothers only, family functioning related to children’s prosocial behavior directly (better family functioning related to higher prosocial behavior) and indirectly via supportive responses (better family functioning related to higher supportive responses, which related to higher prosocial behavior). Model invariance across child gender was tested and results showed that maternal supportive responses related more strongly to prosocial behavior among daughters than sons. Maternal nonsupportive emotion socialization responses related more strongly to problem behavior among sons than daughters; paternal nonsupportive responses related more strongly related to problem behaviors among daughters than sons. Findings support the role of family functioning in parental emotion socialization and suggest gender-specific influences of parental emotion socialization.
Highlights
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Emotion socialization occurs within the family context, thus family functioning may relate to emotion socialization.
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In contemporary Chinese families, both fathers and mothers invest time and energy in childrearing.
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Family functioning related to children’s social competence directly and indirectly through parents’ emotion socialization.
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Findings showed varying relations of emotion socialization with child behaviors according to child gender.
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Culture-specific gendered expectations for children’s socio-emotional behavior and family roles may shape socialization.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Zhu, D., Chen, Y., Li, L. et al. Family Functioning, Emotion Socialization, and Children’s Social Competence: Gender-Specific Effects in Chinese Families. J Child Fam Stud 32, 257–271 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-022-02480-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-022-02480-1