Parents' awareness and management of emotion: Implications for parenting practices and child outcomes

The present study examined relations among parental awareness and management (positive responses, discomfort) of their own feelings of anger and sadness, emotion-related parenting practices (ERP), children's social-emotional competence (SEC), externalizing behavior (EB), and children's emotion understanding (EU). SS were 101 low-income parents and their preschool children (36–60 months) who were enrolled in two Head Start programs in Central Pennsylvania. Parents and teachers reported on children's SEC and EB. Parents were interviewed individually at home and teachers completed self-administered questionnaires. All analyses conducted were correlational with the exception of testing a mediational model, that used OLS regression to test the mediating effect of children's EU on the relationship between ERP and SEC. Parents who reported positive management of anger reported using more ERP, and their children received more favorable ratings by teachers, but not parents, on measures of SEC. Children of parents who reported having a high awareness of anger were rated by both parents and teachers as having greater SEC and, by teachers only, as having fewer EB. Unexpectedly, parental discomfort with anger was positively related to teacher reports of children's SEC and negatively related to EB. With regard to sadness, associations were found between awareness of sadness and ERP, but no associations were found between positive management of sadness, discomfort with sadness, and ERP, children's SEC, or EB. Also unexpected was the positive correlation between ERP and parents' reports of EB. No support was found for a mediating role of children's EU in the relationship between ERP and SEC. These findings are discussed within the context of meta-emotion theory, which posits that parental awareness and healthy management of their own emotions plays a central role in how parents socialize their children's emotions and in child outcomes. In addition, these findings have implications for interventions that focus on anger management, and that aim to link classroom goals (i.e., promoting social skills) to family processes, such as parenting practices.