Emotion Regulation in Syrian Newcomer Children: Roles of Traumatic Stressors and Parenting Strategies

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Solicited Content: Refugee Children

Abstract

Understanding emotion regulation skills in newcomer children is important because coping with emotions may reduce potential negative outcomes of being exposed to traumatic stressors (Malti et al., 2016). However, little is known about how traumatic experiences of refugee families and parents’ discipline strategies during their migration and resettlement shape their children’s emotion regulation. Here we examine whether children “mature faster” if their family went through high levels of stress, and what kinds of parenting strategies motivate children to cope better with their emotions during the resettlement process.

Participants were 79 Syrian newcomer children (51% girls; ages 5-13) and their mothers who have resettled in Canada within the past two years. Both mothers and children reported their experiences of traumatic life stressors (Bean et al., 2006; Homes & Rahe, 1967). Mothers reported on their uses of three parenting strategies using the Parental Discipline Questionnaire (Patrick & Gibbs, 2012): power assertion (alpha = .75), other-oriented induction (alpha = .85), and love withdrawal (alpha = .75). Mothers also reported their children’s emotion regulation using the Children’s Emotion Management Scale (Zeman et al., 2001), which yielded anger regulation (alpha = .84) and sadness regulation (alpha = .76) subscales.

Separate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted for sadness regulation and anger regulation (see Table 1). Controlling for child gender and age, mothers’ experiences of traumatic life stressors predicted children’s better sadness regulation while children’s own experiences of traumatic stressors predicted poorer anger regulation. Over and above the effects of traumatic stressors, mothers’ power assertion was negatively related to anger regulation, while love withdrawal was positively related to sadness- and anger regulation.

The results suggest that caregivers play an important role in Syrian newcomer children’s development of emotion regulation during resettlement, both through their experiences of traumatic stressors as well as their parenting behaviors. Mothers’ traumatic stress was related to children’s better sadness regulation, which suggests that newcomer children may have matured faster under high-adversity context. On the other hand, children’s own experiences of traumatic stress had the opposite relation to anger regulation, supporting the importance of differentiating sadness regulation from anger regulation. Mothers’ parenting strategies were also differentially related to children’s sadness and anger regulation. These findings will be discussed while considering the context of adversity and developmental resilience as well as culture.

Authors

• Ju-Hyun Song, California State University - Dominguez Hills
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author