Poster #205 - Emotional Functioning and School Readiness in Preschool Children: The Influence of Mothers’ Emotion Regulation

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Early school readiness skills have been found to be important predictors of various outcomes in children, such as literacy, math, and social skills (Magnusun, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007). Research has begun to explore the role of child emotional factors in school readiness skills, such as emotion regulation (ER), the ability to regulate emotional responses (Thompson, 1994), and emotion lability, tendencies to fluctuate in emotions rapidly and intensely (Walerious, Fogleman, & Rosen, 2016). Children with fewer ER abilities have been reported to exhibit more difficulty focusing on classroom tasks (Graziano, Reavis, Keane, & Calkins, 2007), and children exhibiting more negative emotional lability have been reported by teachers to be more challenging to teach (Kozloff, 1994).
Looking at early influences on these emotion-academic links, research has begun to explore how parents’ emotional functioning contributes. Parents’ ER abilities have been found to be related to various negative child outcomes, such as an increased risk for depressive symptoms (Sanders, Zeman, Poon, & Miller, 2015). Interestingly, the relationship between parental ER and children’s academic functioning remains relatively unstudied and it is unclear whether children’s emotional functioning plays a role in it. The current study sought to examine the mediating effect of children’s emotional functioning on the relationship between mothers’ ER abilities and children’s school readiness.
Families of preschool-aged children (N = 110) were recruited from the community. Mothers reported on both their own and their child’s ER abilities using the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC), respectively. The DERS measured multiple aspects of mothers’ difficulties with ER, such as non-acceptance of emotional responses, difficulties engaging in goal-directed behaviour, difficulties controlling impulses in the face of strong emotion, lack of emotional awareness, limited access to ER strategies, and lack of emotional clarity. The ERC assessed children’s emotion lability, as well as ER abilities. Children participated in a standardized clinical measure of school readiness, the Developmental Indicators of Early Learning (Speed DIAL-4), which assessed basic skills necessary for learning in the classroom.
Mediation analyses revealed that children’s emotional lability mediated the relationship between mothers’ ER difficulties and children’s school readiness, such that children of mothers with more difficulties with ER exhibited more emotion lability and, subsequently, lower school readiness scores. This mediating effect was not observed with children’s ER abilities. Follow-up analyses showed that children’s emotion lability mediated the relationship between particular facets of mothers’ ER difficulties (e.g., ability to engage in goal-directed behaviours and control impulses during an emotion, access to ER strategies, and clarity about emotions) and children’s’ school readiness.
Findings inform interventions aimed to improve school readiness and later academic success in children with high lability. More specifically, it seems that supporting parents in their development of adaptive ER abilities, as opposed to targeting emotional functioning in children directly, may have intergenerational benefits: parents who are more able to regulate emotions themselves may in turn model and foster these skills in their children. This healthy ER within the family system then predicts children’s chance of academic success.

Authors

• Oana Bucsea, York University
  Presenting Author

• Stacey Kosmerly, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maria Rogers, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author