Poster #134 - Child Narratives: Associations Between Expressivity in Early Childhood and Mother’s Supportiveness and Emotion Regulation

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Emotion regulation (ER) includes the intrinsic self-regulation and extrinsic mutual regulation between dyads that allow individuals to manage their emotions and accomplish their goals (Thompson, 1994). Associations exist between children’s use of ER strategies in narratives and their ability to manage these emotions in real life (Cole, Dennis, Smith-Simon, & Cohen, 2009). Parents’ behavior has been linked to child language and literacy outcomes, which in turn provide a necessary base for children’s ER (Dodici, Draper, & Peterson, 2003; Kopp, 1989; Russell, Oxford, Speiker, & Lee, 2016). For example, parenting behaviors have been found to mediate the relationship between qualities of children’s narratives at ages four and six, and child ER outcomes at age eight (Berzenski & Yates, 2017). Specifically, observed maternal ER was negatively associated with unsupportive emotion parenting, and mother’s self-reported lack of ER was positively associated with unsupportive parenting and negatively associated with adaptive strategies for 9.5 year-olds’ ER (Morelen, Shaffer, & Suveg, 2014). The present study explored whether associations between maternal behavior and self-reported ER would be associated with their preschooler’s language outcomes in the context of a child-narrative storytelling task. We hypothesized mothers’ self-reported ER and observed behavior will be significantly associated with children’s ER (H1) and language outcomes (H2).
Methods
Participants included 48 mother-child dyads (50% daughters); mothers ranged in age from 22 to 47 years of age (average = 33.69 years) and children were between the ages of 4.5 and 5.5 (average = 4.91 years). See Table 1 for further sample characteristics. As part of a larger study, dyads participated in a 15-minute free-play session, coded using Pino-Pasternak and colleagues (2010) coding scheme on interaction characteristics. The dyad then completed a child storytelling task using selected pages from the picture book Journey (Becker, 2014, Figure 1). The interaction was coded for supportive maternal presence using an adapted version of the Child-Parent Interaction Rating Scales for the Three-Bag Assessment (Brady-Smith, O’Brien, Berlin, Ware, & Brooks-Gunn, 1999). While the mother completed a set of surveys, the researcher and child completed the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT-2 Form B; Williams, 2007). Surveys included the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006) and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2013), respectively.
Results
H1: Children’s effortful control (EC) was significantly positively associated with parent/ adult-regulation instructional behaviors (r=.393, p<.05) and significantly negatively associated with child-regulation (r=-.316, p<.05). Parents who reported their children having EC were both less likely to scaffold opportunities for metacognition and more likely to take responsibility for controlling interactions with their child.
H2: Mother’s expressive suppression was significantly negatively associated with child EVT age equivalency (r=-.320, p<.05). Child EVT age equivalency was also significantly negatively associated with maternal intrusiveness (r=-.327, p<.05) and maternal acceptance of the narrative (r=-.305, p<.05). Children with lower EVT scores had mothers who suppressed their emotions more, were more intrusive during the storytelling task, and were more accepting of her child’s storytelling narrative. Our discussion explores the best predictors of child outcomes (as indicated by post-hoc linear regression analyses).

Authors

• Kaleigh Tara Dillon, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Beth Russell, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author