Good enough parental responsiveness to Children’s sadness: Links to psychosocial functioning - Poon, Zeman, Miller-Slough, Sanders, Crespo (2017) - Article

Introduction

An important thing for children to learn as they get older, is learning how to modulate and regulate their emotions. This is especially true for emotions such as sadness. One of the ways in which children learn to do this, is through socialization. For example, during infancy, caregivers help the children to regulate their emotional arousal. As children become older, they start to adopt individual emotion regulation strategies, which they learned from the parent-child relationship. Most of the research that studies emotion regulation in children has focused on early childhood. However, more recent research suggests that the parental influence on emotion regulation continues through middle childhood. During middle childhood, parents help their children to refine their emotion regulation skills. This is important, because as children age, they are increasingly confronted with complex social-contextual demands. Also, during middle childhood, thirteen to twenty percent of the children meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental disorder within the previous year. And, lastly, in middle childhood, children have to learn things such as the social standards of behavior (display rules: what should you express and what not), social-problem solving and recognizing and understanding emotions. All of these skills are influenced via the parent-child relationship. 

In the literature on this topic, there is a gap in how each parent influences the emotional development of their child interactively. The authors of this article state that this is important to look at. They state that, because it is unclear whether there is an optimal level of parental support needed for the development of children's emotion regulation skills, it is important to examine how mothers and fathers jointly respond to their children's expressions of sadness. By doing this, questions such as: "is it necessary that both parents provide highly supportive responses to their children's sadness, for optimal psychological well-being?". Therefore, this study looks at the individual and interactive effects of mothers' and fathers' sadness socialization responses in relation to their children's psychological and social adjustment.

Parental emotion socalization can occur through direct and indirect methods. For example, the beliefs that parents have about emotions and the acceptability of these emotions, are probably communicated during conversations with the child. These conversations or discussions are important, because these help the child in his or her socio-emotional development. The frequency and content of parental discussion of emotion have also been linked to children's emotion regulation skills and can influence the children's emotional development in a positive as well a a negative way.

Parental emotion socialization is often divided in two: supportive or unsupportive. Parents have a set of feelings and thoughts about one's emotions and their children's emotions. These are called meta-emotion philosophies. These philosophies are also often divided into two categories. To elaborate, parents who adopt a positive, supportive philosophy are more aware of their children's emotion and help their children with labeling their feelings. They see their children's experience of negative affect as a way to learn and to grow. This kind of socialization responses are linked with positive outcomes, such as adaptive emotion regulation, fewer psychological symptoms and higher levels of academic achievement and social competence.

In contrast, parents with a negative and unsupportive response, lack awareness of their child's emotions, have deficiencies in their emotion vocabulary and attempt to alter the emotion instead of viewing it as an opportunity to learn and to grow. 

Sometimes parents find the ways in which their children manage their emotions, aversive. They then try to eliminate these emotion-provoking stimuli and minimize the child's experience of negative experiences. When the child does express negativity, they react with personal distress, try to distract the child from the emotion, punish the child or ignore the child's emotions altogether. Findings from previous research have shown that when parents are unsupportive to their children's emotionality, this is linked to problem behaviors and poor social functioning in middle childhood. Also, mothers who employ unsupportive strategies, more often have adolescents with depressive symptoms.

Most studies that have been conducted have looked at maternal responses or a combination of maternal and paternal socialization practices. So, there is not much literature about how mothers and fathers socialize their children's emotional development interactively. Many studies have also not included fathers, even though they play a unique role in children's social and emotional development. However, it seems to be the case that differential maternal and paternal responses to their children's emotional expressions are associated with girls' internalizing and boys' externalizing symptomatology. Also, mothers tend to use more words in general and more words related to emotion during parent-child discussions compared to fathers. Also, compared to fathers, mothers are more likely to respond to sadness of their children with expressive encouragement. However, both parents use expressive encouragement or problem-focused responses more often with daughters than with sons.

The current study

In this study, multiple methods have been used to look at how mothers and fathers respond during discussions with their children about past events that evoked sadness. They also looked at how their responses are related to children's outcomes on things such as internalizing and externalizing symptoms and social functioning. 

The authors selected a middle childhood sample because children in this age group shift from relying on external sources for emotion regulation to more independent strategies. Parents still remain important for emotion socialization during this transitional developmental period.

The authors hypothesized that mothers' and fathers' individual responsiveness to emotions expressed by their children would be negatively related to internalizing and externalizing symptoms and positively related to social functioning. The inverse relationship was hypothesized for negative emotional responsiveness. 

When it comes to the interaction between maternal and paternal positive and negative responsiveness on boys' and girls' psycho-social functioning, the authors hypothesized that positive responses by both parents would lead to more positive psycho-social outcomes compared to two negative parental responses to sadness. But, it was unclear whether having just one positive parental response would be as effective as having two positive responses and it was also unclear whether the sex of the parent that provides the negative response would lead to different outcomes for daughters compared to sons. Based on the literature about sex differences, the authors hypothesized that having a negatively responsive father and a positively responsive mother to sadness, leads to poorer social functioning for boys, because their father is their role model. 

Methods

Participants

The participants in this study were 82 families. All of these families were 2-parent households. The children ranged from eight to eleven years old and were in the third, fourth and fifth grade. There were no significant differences between boys and girls on demographics such as age, race or socioeconomic status (SES).

Measures

Parent-child sadness discussion task

Before each session, the researcher asked the child to think of two times when he or she felt sad. After this, the children and each parent were asked to discuss  the event within 10 minutes. The topic that would be discussed with each parent was chosen at random. The discussions were video-recorded, transcribed and coded. 

Content coding

There were nine categories within the emotional discussions concerning the death or injury of a pet, interpersonal loss, or a conflict with peers/siblings/friends. There were no significant differences in content area between the topics that were discussed with mothers and fathers. 

Maternal and paternal positive responsiveness

The extent to which the mother or the father actively is engaged in the discussion, the degree to which they displayed positive responses to their child's sadness disclosure and the quality of their communication skills were used as a measure of positive responsiveness. When the score is zero, this means that there is no engagement from the father or the mother during the discussions about the sad events.

Maternal and parental negative responses

The degree to which mothers or fathers were unsupportive and displayed negative affect in response to their child's discussion of the sadness-evoking event, was used as a measure of negative responses. A score of zero means that the parent never showed any sign of negativity or unsupportive responsiveness.

Child psychopathology symptoms

Child behavior checklist

The parents rated their child's internalizing, externalizing and social functioning using the Child Behavior Checklist. The Child Behavior Checklist consists of 118 items which are rated on a 3-point scale.

Discussion

This study wanted to use the parent-child emotion discussions as a way to determine how mothers' and fathers' responses to their children's sadness would influence the child's socialization. This study is unique, because it not only looks at the separate effects of mothers' and fathers' positive and negative responses on the children's psychological and social functioning, but also at the interactive effects. The results of this study showed a complex pattern of findings. This also shows that maternal and paternal emotion socialization operate in different ways. 

To elaborate, the findings showed that the more positive mothers respond to their daughters' sadness, the fewer self-reported internalizing symptoms these girls exhibited. This is in line with previous research. So, apparently having an outlet to express sadness has beneficial effects for girls. However, this did not seem to apply to boys for either mother- or father- reports of internalizing behaviors. An explanation for this could be that support for sadness does not work the same for boys as it does for girls. For example, Rose et al. found that boys thought that expressing their personal problems to their friends would make them feel "weird" or would be a waste of time for their friends. 

When it comes down to children's externalizing symptoms, the more mothers positively respond, the lower the daughters' externalizing behaviors, as reported by fathers. There were no main effects found for boys' externalizing behaviors. An explanation could be that mothers are more "in tune" with the emotions of their daughters and therefore are more able to be salient socialization role models for their daughters, compared to their sons. 

This study also showed that there was a significant interaction between mothers' and fathers' negative responsiveness on mother-reported externalizing symptoms for boys. What is remarkable is that boys with two highly negative responsive parents showed the lowest levels of externalizing symptoms. To elaborate, boys with a negatively responsive mother and a disengaged father showed the highest externalizing symptoms, as reported by mothers.

An explanation could be that having two parents who are both consistently unsupportive of their sons' sadness, may generalize so that boys suppress outward displays of negative emotions, such as anger outbursts and aggressive behaviors. It could also be the case that these boys have learned not to rely on their parents and instead rely on their environment such as their peers and teachers. This might serve as a buffer against the development of externalizing behavior problems.

There were no significant associations found with regards to the externalizing symptoms of sons' as reported by fathers. 

Another finding was that the parent's sadness socialization processes were related to children's social competency. In contrast to internalizing and externalizing behaviors, parents were in agreement about their perception of their children's social competency. What was remarkable is that boys who have one positively responding parent and one negatively responding parent, showed the most adaptive levels of social functioning. The second interaction showed that having a supportive mother and a disengage father or having a disengaged mother and a highly negatively responsive father is related to highest level of boys' social competency. Even though it seems that having two parents who both respond positively to their children's sadness expressions would is the optimal model for parenting, it seems that having at least one parent who is responsive while the other is disengaged, also has positive outcomes.