The Influence Mechanism And Intervention Research Of Mindful Parenting On Children’s Emotion Regulation

Early childhood is a critical period for the development of emotion regulation.Preschool Children with strong emotion regulation tend to exhibit more prosocial behaviors,have good peer relationships,and are more likely to achieve academic success in the future,and then better adapt to society.However,children with poor emotion regulation often face more social adjustment problems.They may have lower peer acceptance and more internalized and externalized problem behaviors,such as depression,anxiety,social withdrawal and so on.Previous studies have explored the factors that affect children’s emotional regulation from the perspective of parents’ emotion socialization.However,few studies have explored the front-end factors of parents’ emotional socialization,and it is important to focus on the psychological components that can continue to influence parents’ emotional socialization.As a meta-parenting structure including meta-emotion and meta-cognition,mindful parenting directly affects parents’ cognition,emotion and behavior in the process of education.When parents are mindful they experience less emotional stress,are able to treat their children with acceptance and compassion,and engage in more positive parenting behaviors,it is considered a more advanced concept.Mindful parenting can affect children’s ability of emotion regulation through three processes.First of all,mindful parents usually have good emotional adjustment ability,they may become the object of children’s observation and learning.Second,mindful parents keenly aware of their children’s emotions,accept their children’s emotions,use more supportive responses to respond to the emotions of children.Finally,mindful parents create a positive family emotional climate for their children.These three processes are in accordance with the Tripartite Model of the Impact of the Family on Children’s Emotion Regulation and Adjustment by Morris.However,the existing empirical researches have the following problems:(1)the current research focuses more on the impact of mindful parenting on children’s negative development results,only a few studies have investigated the effect of mindful parenting on children’s ability of emotion regulation by means of questionnaires.(2)there is no research to explore the mediating effect of the three process on the relationship between mindfulness education and children’s emotion regulation.(3)More importantly,there is no research on the causal relationship between mindful parenting and children’s emotion regulation.Therefore,this study addresses three questions:(1)the direct effect of mindful parenting on children’s emotion regulation.(2)the mediating effect of family environment(parents’ emotion regulation parents’ reactions to children’s emotion,family emotion climate)on the relationship between mindful parenting and children’s emotion regulation.(3)design an intervention experiment to explore the causal relationship between mindful parenting and children’s emotion regulation.A questionnaire survey was conducted among 485 families of preschool children.The results showed that:(1)parents’ mindful parenting can directly and negatively affect children’s emotion lability/ negativity;It can also indirectly affect children’s emotion lability/ negativity through parents’ emotion regulation,parents’ reactions to children’s emotion,and family emotional climate.(2)the direct effect of mindful parenting on children’s emotion regulation is established,but the mediating effect of family environment is not.In study 2,MPP was adapted to Chinese parents,and the content of emotion coaching was incorporated into it,and an online course of mindful emotion program was designed,it not only changes parents’ attitude,cognition and emotion,but also provides parents with concrete methods to deal with children’s emotion.A randomized controlled experiment was conducted to verify the intervention effect of the program,with 48 subjects in the experimental group and 49 in the control group.In the experimental group,the parents participated in two 60-80 min classes per week for 8weeks.The parents of the control group did not receive any treatment and were given all the materials to learn on their own after the experiment.Parents’ questionnaires were collected before and after the course.Thirty-one parents in the experimental group,who had attended more than 10 sessions and an average of 12.5 sessions,were considered high participants and included in the final analysis.A control group of 37 parents completed a posttest questionnaire.The results show that:(1)the online course can help parents improve the level of mindful parenting,increase the supportive reactions,reduce the non-supportive reactions,and improve parents’ ability of acquiring emotion regulation strategies.(2)curriculum can improve children’s emotional stability.(3)the influence of mindful parenting on children’s emotion regulation is independent of the influence of family environment.(4)there is a causal relationship between mindful parenting and children’s emotion regulation.In conclusion,the present study used questionnaire and experimental methods to explore and intervene the front-end factors affecting children’s emotion regulation,based on the Tripartite Model,this paper first explores the mechanism of the influence of mindful parenting on children’s emotion regulation.More importantly,this study creatively integrated mindful parenting and emotion coaching to form a set of effective emotion curriculum for Chinese children’s parents,and achieved significant intervention effect,this is of great significance to the development of children’s emotion regulation.