Interactive Effects of Parental Support and Psychological Control on Children’s Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Emotions and Parenting

Abstract

Introduction. Parents have important impacts on children’s development. In particular, previous research has shown that parents play a major role in shaping children’s emotion regulation skills (Morris et al., 2017). Warm and responsive parenting behaviors have been positively associated with children’s ability to regulate their emotions (e.g., Houltberg et al., 2012), whereas psychological control has been linked with poorer emotion regulation (Cui et al., 2014). Prior work on parenting has typically examined the effects of adaptive and maladaptive parenting behaviors separately or has focused on the effects of one parenting behavior over and above the impacts of another behavior (e.g., Tuggle et al., 2014). It is possible, however, that there are interactive effects between different parenting variables. Therefore, the goal of the current short-term longitudinal study was to investigate whether parental psychological control moderated the prospective links from parental support to emotion (dys)regulation in middle childhood.

Method. Participants included 226 children (50.0% girls; 52.7% Hispanic/Latinx) in the 3rd-5th grade and their homeroom teachers from two local elementary schools in the West South-Central region of the United States. Ages ranged from 7 to 12 years (M = 9.27 years, SD = 0.94 years). Children completed self-report measures of parental psychological control, parental support, emotion regulation, and emotion dysregulation in the Fall and Spring semesters of an academic school year (approximately 6 months apart). Teachers completed online surveys during the same months in which child data were collected, which included measures of emotion regulation and dysregulation.

Results. A series of multilevel models were estimated to examine the prospective links from parenting behaviors to children’s emotion regulation and dysregulation. Results indicated that parental psychological control moderated the impact of parental support on emotion regulation (see Figure 1). That is, parental support predicted increases in child-reported emotion regulation over time for children who experienced low (–1 SD) to moderate (mean) levels of psychological control. However, for youth who experienced high levels of psychological control (+1 SD), parental support was not associated with child-reported emotion regulation over time. A moderating effect was not found for emotion dysregulation; rather, parental psychological control predicted increases in child-reported emotion dysregulation, and parental support negatively predicted teacher-reported emotion dysregulation over time.

Conclusions. The current study provides initial evidence that parental psychological control might suppress the positive impact of parental support on the development of emotion regulation. For children who experienced low to moderate levels of psychological control, parental support predicted improvements in emotion regulation over time. When youth experienced high levels of psychological control, however, parental support was not associated with changes in emotion regulation over time. It is possible that youth who experience both warm/supportive parenting behaviors and psychologically controlling behaviors—including attempts to elicit negative emotions as a mechanism of control—find it more difficult to regulate emotions due to the inconsistency in parents’ behaviors. Additional research is needed to further investigate the interactive effects of both adaptive and maladaptive parenting behaviors on children’s emotional functioning.

Authors

• Brianna Turney Ricker, Texas Tech University
  Presenting Author

• Carlos Roryver Sanchez, Texas Tech University

• James Barnett, Texas Tech University

• Montana Baker, Texas Tech University

• John L Cooley, Texas Tech University