The Relationship Between Parental Emotion Regulation And Child Emotion Regulation:Similarities And Differences Between Parenting And Intergenerational Parenting

In January 2023,the Ministry of Education and 13 other departments jointly issued the Opinions on Sound School-Family-Society Collaborative Parenting Mechanism,emphasizing the key role of family education in the healthy growth of children.Parenting(where parents primarily raise their children)and intergenerational parenting(where grandparents primarily raise their grandchildren)are the two basic forms of family education in China.Parents today are faced with the pressures of social life and a busy work schedule with no time to care for their children,so they leave them to be raised by their fathers.In contrast to parenting,which was the mainstay of family education in the past,intergenerational parenting has become an inevitable trend widely seen in family education.In the parenting process,although grandparents have sufficient time to spend with children,the educational concepts and methods of grandparents are likely to be overprotective and indulgent to children,leading to poor emotional regulation of children.This study focuses on the development of emotion regulation of children under parental and intergenerational upbringing and the mechanism of the influence of parental emotion regulation on children’s emotion regulation,to provide effective strategies and scientific guidance for parent-child relationships and child discipline in our country.The elementary school years are a time of rapid development of children’s emotion regulation.Children’s initial emotional experience takes place in the family environment,and the caregiver provides the structure or framework for the development of children’s emotional regulation skills to make them grow up.The current understanding of children’s emotion regulation tends to take a static perspective;this study examined the dynamic developmental characteristics of children’s emotion regulation across parenting types using a person-centered approach to discover the developmental patterns of children’s emotion regulation across parenting patterns.In addition,the chain of relationships between each intergenerational member of the family system can play a role in children’s development.Parents’ and children’s lives,as well as grandparents’ and grandchildren’s lives,are interconnected.Considering the variability in the roles of parental and intergenerational caregivers,this study conducted a comparative study of both parental and intergenerational caregiver families.Using questionnaires and observations of behavioral interactions,this study examined the general and overarching relationships between parental caregivers(mothers)and intergenerational caregivers(grandmothers)and children’s emotion regulation.It also explores the process mechanisms of the parent-child/grandparent-grandchild relationship in different interaction contexts.The following conclusions were ultimately drawn.(1)There are differences in the development of emotional regulation between children raised by parenting and children raised across generations.(2)The use of emotion regulation strategies by the caregiver can facilitate the use of emotion regulation strategies by the child.Intergenerational caregivers have a more targeted impact on children,whereas parental caregivers have a broader impact on children.(3)For parenting families,the higher the level of parent-child intimacy,the higher the frequency of child cognitive reappraisal use,the lower the frequency of expression inhibition use,and the higher the frequency of mother cognitive reappraisal use;the higher the level of parent-child conflict,the lower the frequency of child cognitive reappraisal use,the higher the frequency of expression inhibition use,and the lower the frequency of mother cognitive reappraisal use.(4)For intergenerational families,the closer the grandparent-grandchild relationship,the higher the frequency of adaptive emotion regulation strategies used by children and grandmothers;the higher the level of grandparent-grandchild conflict,the higher the frequency of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies used by children and grandmothers.(5)Parental and intergenerational caregivers have different mechanisms of action on children’s emotion regulation.In intergenerational families,parent-child intimacy mediated between the mother’s cognitive reappraisal and the child’s cognitive reappraisal,and did not mediate between the mother’s expression inhibition and the child’s expression inhibition;in intergenerational families,grandparent-grandchild intimacy mediated between grandmother’s cognitive reappraisal and child’s cognitive reappraisal,and grandparent-grandchild conflict mediated between grandmother’s expression inhibition and child’s expression inhibition.(6)In the context of “cooperative” interactions,the parent-child relationship quality was higher than that of grandchild relationship quality,and the mother’s emotion regulation was higher than that of grandmother’s emotion regulation.The parent-child relationship mediates the effect of parental regulation on children’s emotion regulation,and the grandparentgrandchild relationship mediates the effect of intergenerational regulation on children’s emotion regulation.(7)In the “conflict” situation,parent-child emotional regulation scores were lower than those of intergenerational children,mother emotional regulation scores were higher than those of grandmother emotional regulation scores,and the quality of the parent-child relationship was higher than that of grandchild relationship.The higher the emotional regulation ability of the parent and intergenerational parent,the higher the emotional regulation ability of the child,and the higher the quality of the parent-child relationship and the quality of the grandparentgrandchild relationship.The parent-child relationship mediates between maternal emotion regulation and child emotion regulation,and the grandparent-grandchild relationship mediates between grandmother emotion regulation and child emotion regulation.