1-085 - Parental Emotion Validation: Pathways from Parental Emotional Adjustment to Child Disclosure and Socioemotional Well-Being

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Parental response to child negative emotion has been linked to children’s socioemotional development, as have supportive parental responses to child disclosure. However, little is known about 1) the factors that place parents at risk for negative emotion socialization (ES) practices and 2) the associations between parental ES and children’s willingness to communicate with their parents. The papers in this symposium explore how parents’ own emotional adjustment may be implicated in their ES practices, and consequently, how parental ES relates to children’s own emotion regulation and willingness to communicate openly with their parents. The first paper explores the relationship between fathers’ emotional competence and their negative ES practices (invalidation) and children’s socioemotional well-being in a high risk sample of fathers. The remaining papers examine the impact of parental validating and invalidating behaviors on adolescent disclosure. The first of these papers explores parents’ emotional behaviors that temporally precede the emergence of adolescent disclosure in the midst of a conflict, while the second examines the role of mothers’ personal distress following adolescent negative affect, and maternal validating and invalidating behaviors on the level of detail and substance of adolescent disclosure of a distressing experience to their mothers for the first time. Together, these papers tackle the nuanced relationship between parents’ own emotional adjustment and how they respond to their children’s emotions and children’s willingness to talk openly with their parents during or about an emotionally evocative situation. The discussant will highlight clinical implications for engendering adaptive ES practices and supportive parent-child communication.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Christina Gamache Martin, University of Oregon

Discussant

• Lynn Fainsilber Katz, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Working Through Emotion: Fathers’ Capacity for Emotion Validation and Socialization Practices and Child Well-Being - Presenting Author: Amanda Dyson, University of Toronto; Katreena Scott, University of Toronto; Veerpal Bambrah, University of Toronto; Nadine Narain, University of Toronto

• Parental Emotion-Related Behaviors that Facilitate and Inhibit Adolescent Disclosure to Parents during Everyday Interactions - Presenting Author: Alexandra Main, University of California, Merced; Janice Disla, UC Merced

• In the Spirit of Full Disclosure: Maternal Personal Distress and Responsiveness and Youth Disclosure of Distressing Experiences - Presenting Author: Christina Gamache Martin, University of Oregon; Hyoun Kim, Oregon Social Learning Center; Jennifer J Freyd, University of Oregon