On raising emotionally competent preschoolers in China : contribution of parenting styles and parental emotion regulation strategies, and preliminary evaluation of an emotion coaching parenting intervention

Abstract

Children with better emotion regulation competence have been shown to achieve more positive social and academic outcomes, hence understanding the development of emotion regulation in children is important. To explore on the issue of raising emotionally competent preschoolers in China, two studies are presented in the current thesis. A total of 1011 adults representing two generations of parents (674 parents, mean age=35.07; 337 grandparents, mean age=60.39) from an urban area of mainland China participated in Study 1. The grandparents were from multigeneration families and directly involved in the caregiving of their preschool grandchildren. They reported using a similar level of cognitive reappraisal but significantly more expressive suppression in emotion regulation than the parents in this study. Both the parents and grandparents exhibited the authoritative parenting style more often than the authoritarian style in their interactions with preschoolers. However, grandparents showed more tendency to protect their grandchildren’s wellbeing and had stronger beliefs of maternal involvement in childcare. Moreover, study 1 also found that children’s ER competence correlated positively with the parents’ use of cognitive reappraisal and authoritative parenting, while negatively with expressive suppression and authoritarian parenting. Similar correlational patterns were observed for the grandparents except that higher expressive suppression did not predict lower ER competence in their grandchildren. Mediational analyses showed that higher cognitive reappraisal in parents predicted higher ER competence in children by way of more frequent use of inductive reasoning and autonomy granting and less frequent use of corporal punishment and nonreasoning in parenting. Inductive reasoning was also a significant mediator between higher cognitive reappraisal in grandparents and higher ER competence in preschoolers in the skipped-generation parenting relationship. Our findings suggest that positive parenting styles play a significant mediation role between caregivers’ and children’s ER during early childhood. Based on the findings of study 1, we performed an evaluation of an emotion coaching parenting intervention culturally adapted from the original “Tuning in to KidsTM (TIK)” program in Study 2. Eighty-nine mothers with preschoolers from an urban city of China were randomly assigned to either the intervention or waitlist control group. The TIK group received six sessions of intervention on emotion coaching parenting training conducted once a week for six consecutive weeks. The training significantly improved participating mothers’ positive involvement and the use of emotion coaching in their parenting practices. More expressive encouragement and emotion-focused reactions to children’s emotion expression, while less punitive parenting and emotional dismissing were also found after training. Furthermore, more use of emotion related words was observed during the mother-child interaction in a story-telling task. In conclusion, the current studies underscored the importance of caregivers’ positive parenting practices and their use of cognitive reappraisal in emotion regulation on raising emotionally competent preschoolers. Our findings provided evidence to support the feasibility of implementing an emotion coaching parenting intervention that targets the characteristics of Chinese parenting, and to prove its effectiveness in enhancing Chinese parents’ sensitivity and efficacy in facilitating their children’s emotional development.