Low-Income Ethnically Diverse Mothers’ and Fathers’ Emotion Socialization Strategies and Children’s Social Competence

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

Abstract

Children who are able to regulate emotions tend to be better socially adjusted and are able to monitor and modify their emotions to achieve their personal goals (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004; Zeman et al., 2006). Children learn to label their emotions, recognize them in others, and appropriately change their behaviors and feelings during interactions with caregivers. Most emotion socialization research has been conducted with White, middle-class mothers (e.g., Miller et al., 2016) and has been used to establish what is normative and expected in how children learn about emotions. However, given that children come from diverse cultural groups, they may be exposed to different socialization practices that may reflect diverse parenting views. Thus, it is important to examine how ethnically diverse mothers and fathers teach their children to regulate their emotions in the toddler years, a period where children’s emotion regulation abilities are emerging (Brownell, 2007), and gain insight into whether these practices are related to children’s social competence.

Using a sample of low-income African American and Latino couples (N=123) and their children participating in an ongoing intervention, we examine how mothers’ and fathers’ responses to their toddlers’ display of emotions at 18 months are associated with social skills at 24 months. We ask: (1) How do mothers and fathers respond to toddlers’ displays of emotions at 18 months? (2) How are mothers’ and fathers’ responses at 18 months associated with children’s social skills at 24 months? (3) How do mothers’ and fathers’ responses interact to influence children’s social skills? We expect that mothers and fathers who provide more supportive responses at 18 months will have children with higher social competence skills at 24 months compared to parents who provide fewer supportive responses. Parents who provide more non-supportive responses at 18 months will have children with lower social competence skills at 24 months compared to parents who provide fewer non-supportive responses. We expect that the association between maternal supportive responses and children’s social skills will be stronger when fathers are also highly supportive than when fathers are less supportive.

Parents’ responses to children’s positive and negative affect were coded during semi-structured parent-child interactions using event coding. Responses included supportive, didactic, minimizing, distraction, punishment, and ignoring. Mothers and fathers reported on children’s social competence at 24 months using the BITSEA (Carter & Briggs-Gowan, 2005). Control variables include intervention condition and child sex and temperament.

We will conduct factor analysis to create two factors: supportive and non-supportive responses. Conceptually, we hypothesize that supportive responses will consist of supportive, didactic, and distraction responses while non-supportive responses will consist of minimizing, distraction, and ignoring. We will provide descriptive statistics (see Table 1 for preliminary data) and run separate regression models for mothers and fathers. For the last research question, we will include an interaction term in the model. Due to COVID-19, coding of data is taking place remotely and will be completed by December 2020; analyses will be conducted shortly after. This study can inform researchers’ efforts to support ethnically diverse parents’ emotion socialization.

Authors

• Angelica Alonso, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Marina Angelica Kerlow, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natasha J Cabrera, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephanie M Reich, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author