Relations between caregivers’ emotion regulation strategies, parenting styles, and preschoolers’ emotional competence in Chinese parenting and grandparenting

Abstract

This study examined the associations between caregivers’ emotion regulation (ER) strategies and parenting styles, and how they contributed to the preschoolers’ ER competence in a sociocultural context where grandparenting was prevalent. A total of 1011 adults representing 2 generations of parents (674 parents, mean age = 35.1; 337 grandparents, mean age = 60.4) from an urban area of China participated. The grandparents were from co-residential multigeneration families and directly involved in the caregiving of their preschool grandchildren. Results from multigroup structural equation modeling revealed that higher cognitive reappraisal predicted higher authoritative and lower authoritarian parenting in both parents and grandparents, as well as higher ER competence in children. However, higher expressive suppression contributed to lower ER competence in children only in parenting but not grandparenting relationships. Grandparents’ expressive suppression predicted neither their parenting styles nor their grandchildren's ER competence in the mediation analyses. Our findings underscore the importance of caregivers employing cognitive reappraisal in emotion regulation, as well as adopting more authoritative and less authoritarian parenting behaviors in their daily interaction with children, on the development of stronger emotion regulation competence in preschoolers.