Fathers’ and Mothers’ Secure Base Script Knowledge, Management of Child Negative Emotions, and Children’s Emotion Management

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Critical to a child’s adaptive growth is learning how to successfully regulate emotions (Gross & Thompson, 2007). One crucial context in a child’s development of emotion regulation is the family, and more specifically, parenting practices (Morris, et al., 2007). Parental emotion socialization, or parenting behaviors that socialize children’s understanding, experience, expression, and regulation of emotion (Eisenberg et al., 1998), have been linked to children’s emotion regulation, such that more supportive emotion socialization fosters adaptive emotion regulation and unsupportive emotion socialization fosters poorer emotion regulation; however, this literature has often excluded fathers (Brumariu, 2015).

Attachment style may be an important parent characteristic that shapes their emotion socialization of children since the attachment system is activated when one experiences or witnesses a partner under distress (Bowlby, 1969; Brumariu, 2015). Additionally, since attachment is inherently tied to close relationships, a parent’s partner’s attachment may also play a role in emotion socialization across the family system (Cox & Paley, 2003; Bowlby, 1969); however, attachment research lacks attention to fathers. The purpose of this study was to explore how secure base script knowledge—one aspect of an adult’s working model of attachment—relates to mothers’ and fathers’ reports of emotion socialization and children’s emotion management.

Participants (N=100 families) were drawn from a longitudinal study of first-time, different-gender, dual-earner parents and their 7.5-year-old first biological child (59% male). Families had mostly married, White, well-educated parents. Mothers and fathers completed the Attachment Script Assessment (Waters & Rodriguez-Doolabh, 2004; Waters & Waters, 2006), which has participants create narratives based on word lists meant to elicit a secure base script in individuals for which one is present. Secure base script knowledge (SBSK; a type of cognitive script that mirrors how secure attachment partners interact) is assessed in both parent–child relationships (child-oriented SBSK) and romantic partner relationships (partner-oriented SBSK) on a 1-7 scale, with higher scores denoting more SBSK. Additionally, mothers and fathers completed the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scales (Fabes et al., 2002), which had parents respond to scenarios and rate how supportive (i.e., emotion-focused reactions, problem-focused reactions, encouraging emotion expression) they would be in socializing children’s emotions. Children responded to the Children’s Emotion Management Scales (Zeman et al., 2010), which assessed children’s emotion regulation—specifically, dysregulation and inhibition—in the context of worry, anger, and sadness.

Actor–Partner Interdependence Models revealed that mothers’ and fathers’ partner-oriented SBSK predicted their own and their partners’ supportive management of children’s negative emotions (Figure 1). An Actor–Partner Interdependence Mediation Model revealed a significant indirect effect for fathers: when fathers had higher partner-oriented SBSK, they reported more supportive management of children’s negative emotions, which was related to lower levels of child-reported inhibition of sadness, anger, and worry (Figure 2). There were no significant associations with children’s dysregulation of emotion.

This study represents a significant step forward in understanding the role of secure base script knowledge in children’s emotion regulation in the context of the family system, and highlights the importance of including fathers in research on emotion socialization and attachment.

Authors

• Anna Lorraine Olsavsky, Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Jane Schoppe-Sullivan, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author