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Poster #151 - The mediating role of parenting practices in parents’ own emotion regulation’s relation with children’s sympathy

Sat, March 23, 8:00 to 9:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Sympathy refers to feelings of sorrow or concern for a distressed or needy person, and it is an important factor that motivates prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo-Noam, 2015). Parenting practices like parental warmth and inductive discipline have been positively associated, whereas strict control and punitive discipline have been negatively associated with children’s sympathy and prosociality (Carlo et al., 2010). Because such parenting practices appear to have important implications for children’s moral emotions and behavior, understanding the determinants of these parenting practices is of interest. Prinzle et al. (2009) suggested that parents’ own dispositional characteristics likely predict parenting practices. However, researchers have rarely investigated how parents’ own emotion regulation is related to children’s sympathy. In this study, we focused on four types of parents’ emotion regulation strategies when disciplining their children, including tendencies to give in to the child (i.e., capitulation), withdraw from discipline encounters (i.e., escape), think differently about emotion-triggering event to manage emotion (i.e., reappraisal), and conceal emotions by changing behavioral signs (i.e., suppression). We examined their prediction to children’s sympathy, specifically focusing on both supportive and non-supportive aspects of parenting (warmth/induction, and control/punitive) as mediators of the relations.

Participants were 102 children (age in years = 5.34 – 8.56, M = 6.9, SD = .93, 53.9% female), their primary caregiving parents (age = 29.55 – 50.13, M = 38.82, SD = 4.35, 87.3% were mothers), secondary parents (mostly fathers), and their teachers (N = 85). Primary parents reported their emotion regulation strategies (PERI2, Lorber et al., 2017), and parenting behaviors (PSDQ, Robinson et al., 2001). Teachers and both parents reported children’s global sympathy (measure adapted from Bryant, 1982). We created composites of primary parents’ non-supportive parenting (averaging scores of punitive and controlling behaviors, r(101) = .54, p < .001), their supportive parenting (averaging scores of warmth and inductive reasoning, r(101) = .60, p < .001), and children’s sympathy (averaging scores of parents’ and teachers’ reports).

Expected correlations between the variables were found (See Table 1). Using path-analysis, we found that primary parents’ capitulation negatively, and their reappraisal positively, predicted supportive parenting, which in turn, positively predicted children’s sympathy. Additionally, primary parents’ reappraisal negatively, and their escape positively, predicted non-supportive parenting, which in turn, negatively predicted children’s sympathy. All mediated effects were significant (see solid lines in Figure 1).

Results suggested that parents’ emotion regulation strategies including capitulation, escape and reappraisal were important factors of parenting behaviors to predict children’s sympathy. Strengths of the investigation include having multiple reporters on children’s sympathy and including different types of parental emotion regulation strategies and parenting practices in the model. To improve children’s sympathy, interventions may focus on teaching parents adaptive strategies to regulate their own emotions. Such strategies are thought to increase warmth and reasoning practices, and perhaps teach children to think from others’ perspective and be capable of other-oriented concern. Since data of all variables were collected at the same time, longitudinal studies are needed to examine the direction between parents’ emotion regulation and their parenting practices.

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