Parental Emotion Talk in Chinese American Families: Links to Children’s Effortful Control and Socio-emotional Development

• In Event: 2-058 - Emotion Socialization: Past, Present, and Future

Integrative Statement

Parent-child emotion talk (ET) is theorized as one type of emotion socialization strategy, through which parents teach children about emotions. Previous research on ET, conducted primarily with European American (EA) families, showed that parental ET behaviors, such as use of emotion words, asking questions about or providing explanations about emotions, were positively associated with children’s emotion regulation and emotion understanding. However, whether ET has broader socio-emotional benefits on children, and their potential mechanisms remains to be tested. Moreover, despite the cross-cultural findings that Chinese parents engaged in less ET than EA parents, and a greater affiliation with the Chinese culture was associated with less ET in Chinese immigrant parents, no studies tested the links of ET to children’s socio-emotional outcomes in Chinese families. Thus, the cross-cultural generalizability of ET’s socialization function remains to be examined.
The present study tested the prospective relations of parental ET to school-aged children’s effortful control and socio-emotional competence in Chinese American immigrant families. The data come from a two-wave (1.5 years apart) longitudinal study of first-and second-generation Chinese American children (N = 258, age = 6-9 years at Wave 1, 52% from low-income families). At Wave 1 (W1), the parent-child dyad participated in a video-recorded picture book reading task in the lab. Bilingual coders coded the content and quality of parental ET (e.g., the overall quality of emotion talk, frequency of emotion explanations, emotion questions, and number of emotion words). At both waves, parents and teachers rated children’s effortful control (attention focusing and inhibitory control). At Wave 2 (W2), children’s dispositional sympathy was rated by parents, teachers, and children, and social skills were rated by parents and teachers. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test whether parental ET at W1 predicted children’s effortful control at W2, which in turn, was related to their sympathy and social skills at W2. The hypothesized model fit the data well (see Figure 1). As expected, the latent factor of Parental ET at Wave 1 positively predicted the latent factor of Child Effortful Control at W2, which in turn, was positively related to Child Sympathy and Child Social Skills at W2. Mediation analyses supported the hypothesis that effortful control mediated the links between parental ET and children’s sympathy and social skills. The results provided empirical support for the socio-emotional benefits of parental ET in Chinese immigrant families.

Authors

• Qing Zhou, University of California Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Kaley Curtis, Graduate Student
  Non-Presenting Author