Mother-Child Reminiscing: Relations to Children’s Emotion Knowledge and Coping in European-American and Chinese-Immigrant Families

• In Event: Cultural Influences on Children’s Coping with Everyday Stressors

Abstract

Family emotion socialization plays an important role in children’s emotional development. Particularly, mother-child conversations contribute to children’s learning about the causes and consequences of emotions, and the strategies to cope with distress. During mother-child conversations, discussion of internal states makes thoughts and feelings explicit and helps children understand and regulate emotions, whereas discussion of behaviors draws children’s attention outwards and may impede children’s emotion understanding and regulation. Importantly, parent-child narrative interactions often reflect socialization goals embedded in specific cultural contexts.
Research has shown marked variations across cultures in the cultural emphases placed on understanding one’s inner thoughts and feelings as an indication of individuality as opposed to controlling one’s external behaviors to promote social harmony. Such variations can, in turn, influence parenting practices. In this presentation, we report a study that examined conversational interactions between mothers and their school-aged children from European American and Chinese immigrant families, and the relations among discussing internal states and behaviors, children’s emotion knowledge, and emotion coping.
We visited 68 European American and 62 Chinese immigrant children and their mothers three times when children were 6.5, 7, and 8 years of age. During the first visit, each mother and child were asked to talk about one past event that they experienced together. We coded maternal references to internal states and behaviors during mother-child conversation. At the second visit, children’s emotion knowledge was assessed using the Emotion Situation Production task in which children were asked to describe emotional situations for seven emotions (e.g., “What makes people feel sad?”), including four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, and anger) and three self-conscious emotions (guilt, pride, and shame). Children’s responses were coded into distinct conceptual categories for each emotion. The numbers of categories children mentioned across emotions were tabulated to index children’s emotion knowledge. At the final visit, children’s use of coping strategies was reported by their mothers using Children’s Coping Strategies Checklist.
Preliminary results showed that European American mothers made fewer references to behaviors than Chinese immigrant mothers, t=-1.90, p=.059, whereas there was no cultural difference in maternal references to internal states. Compared to Chinese immigrant children, European American children had greater emotion knowledge, t=2.94, p=.004, and were reported to use a larger variety of coping strategies, t=7.10, p<.001. We further examined how mother-child conversion predicted children’s later emotion knowledge and coping strategies, controlling for child’s gender, age, verbal skills, and the volume of mother’s talk. We found a significant interaction effect of culture x discussion of behaviors on children’s knowledge of self-conscious emotions, F(1,102)=7.17 , p=.009, whereby the negative effect of maternal references to behaviors was more pronounced for European American than Chinese immigrant children. Additionally, maternal references to internal states positively predicted the variety of children’s coping strategies across two cultural groups, F(1,93)=16.67 , p<.001.
These findings underscore the importance of mother-child conversations in school-aged children’s emotional development and highlight the role of culture. The implications for both theory and intervention related to children's emotional development will be discussed.

Authors

• Yang Yang, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Jessie Bee Kim Koh, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Qi Wang, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author