Parental Affect Profiles Predict Child Emotion Regulation and Classroom Adjustment in Families Experiencing Homelessness

• In Event: Developmental Pathways Toward Emotional Risk and Resilience: the Role of Parent Characteristics

Abstract

Children growing up in severe poverty are often exposed to high levels of cumulative risk, known to be associated with social-emotional maladjustment (Evans et al., 2013). Poverty-related risk is particularly elevated among families experiencing homelessness, which functions as both an acute stressor and a marker of high chronic risk (Shinn & Khadduri, 2020). Despite these risks, many children experiencing homelessness show healthy social-emotional development, with high-quality parenting and good self-regulation emerging as consistent predictors of resilience (Herbers et al., 2014; Masten et al., 2015). The current study seeks to clarify aspects of parenting that may be associated with adaptive self-regulatory development and social-emotional adjustment in children experiencing homelessness. One candidate is parental modeling of emotion expression, an indirect form of emotion socialization through which parents communicate implicit norms for expressing and regulating emotion (Eisenberg et al., 1998, 2010; Morris et al., 2007). Although research on emotion socialization has primarily been conducted with White, middle-class samples, emerging evidence has linked poverty-related risk with more negative and less positive parental emotion expression (Brophy-Herb et al., 2012; Zalewski et al., 2013). Parents who maintain adaptive emotion socialization, including a preponderance of positive emotion expression, may help to buffer their children from effects of poverty and homelessness.
The current study investigates the emotion dynamics of observed parent-child interactions among families of young children residing in emergency housing. Primary caregivers (n = 214) and their four- to six-year-old children (54.2% male; mean age 5.8 years, SD = 0.6 years; 62.6% African American, 23.8% Multiracial, 5.1% American Indian, 3.7% White, 4.6% other) completed structured interaction tasks designed to elicit positive and negative emotions. Parent and child expressions of positive affect, anger, and internalizing distress were micro-socially coded on a five-point intensity scale from video-recordings of a conflict discussion and a collaborative game. For each parental affect, task-specific mean intensity ratings were submitted to latent profile analysis, used to summarize patterns of emotion modeling across multiple affects and contexts. Parents reported on family demographics, sociodemographic risk, and family adversity. During the following schoolyear, teachers rated children’s social-emotional adjustment using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires (Goodman, 1997) and the adaptive regulation subscale of the Emotion Regulation Checklist (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997). We anticipated that parental modeling of predominantly negative emotion expression would be associated with children’s observed difficulty downregulating negative emotions (i.e., longer duration of sadness and anger) and worse social-emotional adjustment at school.
Latent profile analysis yielded parental affect profiles characterized by above-average expression of positive affect, internalizing distress, and anger, respectively. Parental affect profiles were not significantly related to demographics, sociodemographic risk, family adversity, or teacher-reported adaptive regulation. However, parents’ likelihood of membership in the elevated anger profile predicted children’s observed difficulty down-regulating anger and more teacher-reported social-behavioral problems. Higher sociodemographic risk uniquely predicted more social-behavioral problems at school. Reducing poverty-related risk factors and supporting adaptive anger regulation in parents and young children may be important for enhancing resilience among families experiencing homelessness and similar conditions of high cumulative risk.

Authors

• Madelyn Labella, William and Mary
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Distefano, Roger Williams University

• Jillian Merrick, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago

• Jyothi Ramakrishnan

• Eric Lee Thibodeau

• Ann S. Masten, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities