Maternal practices of emotional socialization and children's emotional self-regulation
Emotional self-regulation; emotion socialization; maternal practices; emotional; self-regulation strategies.
Emotional self-regulation refers to the voluntary control of the behavioral tendency related to emotions, used to achieve personal and contextual goals. This process reverberates on different aspects of socioemotional and cognitive domains and It influences individual psychosocial adjustment. Diverse variables are related to emotional self-regulation. Among these variables, practices used by parents to teach children how to understand and manage negative emotions seem to play an important role on child emotional self-regulation development. The goal of this study was to investigate relations between maternal emotion socialization practices and child emotional self-regulation. To achieve this goal, a correlational design was utilized. Thirty three mothers of children from both sexes and thirty children from these mothers participated in the study. The mothers answered a sociodemographic data sheet, the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) and the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC). Children answered the Interview for Assessment of Emotional Self-regulation Strategies. The results revealed the predictive power of nonsupportive reactions to children’s emotional expression, which results in lower child emotional self-regulation, according to the mothers’ report. Concerning self-regulation reported by children, the results did not confirm the predictive power of maternal emotion socialization practices. By any means, the preliminary analysis indicated positive correlations between some supportive emotion socialization practices and certain subcategories of confrontation strategies reported by children and negative correlations between this type of practice and some subcategories of scape strategies mentioned by the children. Some categories of the maternal nonsupportive practices also correlated positively to the some subcategories of scape strategies reported by children, and negatively to certain subcategories of confrontation strategies described by them. The results indicate the relevance of interventions that promote supportive emotion socialization practices in order to favour the child emotional development. In regards to child report of self-regulation strategies, it is pivotal that new longitudinal and experimental researches including larger samples continue to investigate these relations.