The influence of maternal emotional socialization on children's psychological, social, and academic competence: The mediating effects of emotional understanding and emotional regulation

This study examined the influence of maternal emotional socialization on children's adjustment and potential processes by which this relationship occurred. Participants were 69 African-American maternal caregivers and their 9–13 year old children who lived in violent inner-city neighborhoods. Families completed two interviews, six months apart. Interviews included information about both caregiver's and child's approach to emotions, family competence, child adjustment, and a five-minute, structured task to assess family interactions. Direct emotional socialization practices (caregiver attitude and response towards child emotions) and indirect emotional socialization practices (caregivers handling of own emotions) were expected to influence subsequent child adjustment via their affect on children's emotional understanding and emotional regulation and the quality of the family environment. Caregivers were categorized into three clusters based on meta-emotion interview (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996; 1997) ratings: high emotion coaching, caregiver-emotion-focused, and child-emotion focused.;The first of four major findings from this study was that results were similar to those of original work on meta-emotion philosophy by Gottman et al. (1996; 1997) with a few exceptions. In this study, maternal meta-emotion philosophy was not related to children's academic achievement, while emotional understanding was. Second, there were significant gender differences in the patterns of association between emotional socialization practices and child adjustment, although mean-level gender differences were not present on any of the emotional socialization practices or mediators, nor on most of the child adjustment measures. Third, as predicted, some of the emotional socialization practices were related to child outcomes and were mediated by child emotional regulation and partially mediated by child emotional understanding. Emotion regulation skill, not merely understanding emotions, was a critical factor in the development of these inner-city youth, and was associated with most adjustment measures. Fourth, some distinct differences between associations with direct and indirect emotional socialization practices and outcomes emerged. Direct emotional socialization was related to internal processes in children (i.e. emotional understanding, internalizing behaviors, and task persistence); whereas indirect emotional socialization was related to social processes (i.e. social skills and quality of caregiver-child interaction).