Disruptive Emotions: Mothers' Beliefs about Child Negative Affect when Raising Multiple Children

• In Event: Children's Emotion Socialization Within the Family: Mothers, Fathers, and Grandparents

Abstract

Research on parenting typically focuses on beliefs and behaviors directed toward one target child. However, for parents raising multiple children, parenting perspectives are also impacted by experiences with their other children. Emotion-related parenting is one area where the number of children in the home, and perhaps whether those siblings are older or younger, may have a large impact. Parents with more children may be less tolerant of negative emotion displays, perhaps due to greater parenting stress (Hong & Liu, 2021), less mindful parenting (Joyce, 2022), and if parenting older siblings, greater maturity expectations for children (Nelson & Boyer, 2018).

Participants were drawn from a study of 439 Portuguese mothers of a 6- to 12-year-old target child. Mothers completed questionnaires between May and June of 2019. They ranged in age from 23 to 53 years (M=38.90, SD=4.86) and had between 1 and 6 children (M=1.78, SD=.80). Most mothers were married (87%) and had completed higher education (68%); 48% of target children were male. Using a 20-item Display Beliefs scale (Nelson et al., 2012), mothers rated how acceptable they believed it was for the target child to display dominant (e.g., anger; α=.91) and submissive (e.g., sadness, fear; α=.97) negative emotions in various settings. Parenting stress was measured with the Parenting Stress Scale (Berry & Jones, 1995; α=.81), and mindfulness with the Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting scale (Duncan et al., 2009; α=.90).

Controlling for target child age and family income, linear regressions revealed that number of children was negatively related to mothers’ dominant emotion display beliefs. Mothers with more children were less likely to endorse beliefs that it was acceptable for the target child to display anger. Number of children was unrelated to mothers’ submissive emotion display beliefs, suggesting that children’s sadness, fear, and crying is not believed to be as disruptive as child anger in larger families. Next, we added parenting stress and mindfulness to the regression as covariates. Even though more parenting stress and less mindfulness related to more children and lower tolerance of children’s emotion display, number of children was still significantly related to lower dominant emotion display beliefs above and beyond the impact of these maternal characteristics (see Table 1).

Finally, we used a subsample of mothers to compare those who were raising children younger than the target child (n=59) to those raising children older than the target child (n=166). We excluded families from this analysis where siblings were both older and younger than the target child (n=11) and where the target child was an only child or a twin (n=168). Analyses of covariance controlling for child age, family income, number of children, parenting stress, and mindfulness showed mothers have lower dominant negative emotion beliefs when raising older children compared to younger children (see Table 2). This suggests there may be something unique about the experience of raising older children on mothers’ emotion beliefs, such as greater maturity expectations, that cannot simply be explained by the added burden of children’s anger displays when mothers have greater childrearing responsibilities overall.

Authors

• Jackie A Nelson, University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Carlos Carona, University of Coimbra

• Ana Dias Fonseca, University of Coimbra

• Helena Moreira