Long-Reaching Associations of Late Childhood and Early Adolescent Parental Warmth to Socioemotional Adjustment in Emerging Adulthood

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Parents play a crucial role in their children’s developmental outcomes. One longstanding area of interest is the role of parenting for youths’ socioemotional development (Buri,1991; Jabeen, 2013; Ren & Edwards, 2014), which includes children’s awareness, expression, and management of emotions, as well as their ability to establish positive relationships with others (Katz et al., 2012). Coping responses are a subset of emotion regulation techniques that are solely utilized in the context of stressful life events and circumstances (Compas et al., 2001). Because coping behaviors are activated in response to stress and often involve the regulation of negative internal emotional states, coping can be conceptualized as directly affecting the quality of emotional regulation (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Peer interactions often involve high levels of emotion and researchers have identified adaptive emotion-regulation and coping as important factors for the development of successful peer relationships, an indicator of interpersonal competence more generally (Garner & Estep, 2001). Parenting styles, and the behaviors that constitute those styles, reflect the general coping and emotion philosophies that parents hold in the context of child-rearing, which translate into specific socialization practices (Jabeen, 2013). Research surrounding socialization links ineffective parental socialization practices with emotion dysregulation and hindered interpersonal effectiveness (Voltmer & Von Salisch, 2017). To date, studies that have explored the developmental cascade from parenting to child coping to child interpersonal competence have focused on early childhood. Only a few studies have tested the components of this model across multiple developmental periods, specifically, into the emerging adulthood life stage (Perry et al., 2020), a period that is characterized by heterogeneity in emotional experience, increases in emotion regulation capacity, and increasingly complex social situations that require adequate emotion regulation for successful management (Arnett, 2000; Shulenberg et al., 2004). In this study, we aimed to answer the following research question: How does parental warmth relate to concurrent and future child coping and interpersonal competence from late childhood through to early emerging adulthood?
Method
Data were collected from 241 parents and children over 13 years, at 4 separate time points (at ages 10, 14, 18, and 23). Participants were recruited via mass mailings and newspaper advertisements. Parents completed the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ; Buri et al., 1991) at each time-point, which included a measure of parental warmth. Children completed the Coping Scale for Children and Youth (CSCY; Brodzinsky & Smith, 1992) at ages 10, 14, and 18, and the Adolescent Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire (AICQ; 1990) at ages 14 and 23.
Results & Implications
Preliminary patterns of correlation are presented in Table 1. Future analyses will explore pathways and independent effects. Although the effect sizes were small, the fact that paternal warmth at age 10 and maternal warmth at age 14 were associated with adaptive socioemotional outcomes in emerging adulthood suggests that emotion socialization practices aligned with sensitive and responsive parenting in late childhood and early adolescence may set the stage for successful transitions into and out of adolescence.

Authors

• Amanda Marlandis, Concordia University, Montreal
  Presenting Author

• Erin T Barker, Concordia University, Montreal
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane L Putnick, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD/NIH)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc H Bornstein, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD/NIH)
  Non-Presenting Author