Like Parent, Like Child: Parent and Child Emotion Dysregulation

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Purpose

This study examined the association between children's emotion regulatory processes and parents' emotional problems.

Design

A 5-year longitudinal study of families from Northwestern United States with data collected over 3 time points. Families were recruited in an effort to oversample for multiracial and African American families because these families have historically not been well represented in research studies.

Method

Parental hostility characteristics and subclinical levels of depression were assessed in combination with teachers' reports of children's externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Ninety-one families with married parents and an elementary school-aged child participated in the study.

Findings

There was a significant main effect for the association between fathers' self-reports of hostility and teacher reports of children's externalizing behaviors. Neither parental hostility nor depressive symptoms were significantly associated with the children's internalizing behaviors.

Conclusion

The results suggest that children's externalizing behaviors are associated with their fathers' dysregulated expression of hostility.

Clinical Relevance

Parent-child interactions are a key component of children's emotion regulation development. Our findings may guide health care professionals in identifying and intervening in parental behaviors, particularly fathers' behaviors, that may adversely affect the healthy emotional development of their children.

Section snippets

Parental emotion dysregulation and child outcomes

There is some evidence suggesting that parental emotional dysregulation is associated with internalizing and externalizing problems for children. Studies from the 1980s and the 1990s evaluated the relationship between Type A behavior pattern (TABP) in parents and their children. TABP includes a constellation of behaviors such as hostility, time urgency, and competitiveness and was a theoretical forerunner to the hostility behavior pattern paradigm. These studies found that TABP in the parents

Participants

The 91 families in this study were part of a larger 5-year longitudinal study of families with a child transitioning from middle childhood to adolescence. The data presented in this article were drawn from the first time point of the longitudinal study. Participants were recruited by information sheets distributed in schools, posted flyers, newspaper articles, and community presentations. Interested married couples participated in telephone interviews. Oral assent to participate in the

Procedures

The first time point of the study included two home sessions (i.e., researchers went to the family's home), two laboratory sessions (marital interaction laboratory session and peer interaction laboratory session), and mailed questionnaires for the parents and the target child's teacher about the child's behavior and mental health. The data for this article were drawn from questionnaires filled out by the spouses during the initial home visit and the teacher reports of the child's behaviors at

Marital Quality

The MAT (Locke & Wallace, 1959) was used to measure marital satisfaction because of its excellent psychometric properties (Locke & Wallace, 1959), its strength in distinguishing satisfied from distressed couples, and criterion validity in predicting divorce (Carrère, Buehlman, Gottman, Coan, & Ruckstuhl, 2000). The MAT measures the level of perceived agreement between spouses on a variety of topics including finances, demonstrations of affection, and parenting. In addition, the MAT includes

Results

The means and standard deviations for the variables used in the analyses are presented for the boys and girls in Table 2. Differences in scores between the girls' and boys' families were assessed using t tests. There were no significant differences between the boys' and girls' families on any of the variables (t values ranged between −.62 and 1.00). The t tests were not conducted for the BASC-TRS because they are normed separately for girls versus boys. Separate sets of Pearson's bivariate

Discussion

The results suggest that fathers' dysregulated expression of hostility is associated with their children's externalizing behaviors. Specifically, children whose teachers indicated that they exhibited more externalizing behaviors also had fathers who reported greater numbers of hostile behaviors. However, fathers' self-reports of hostile characteristics did not significantly predict the children's internalizing scores. Mothers' level of dysregulated hostility was not associated with either their

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the families and teachers participating in our research project for letting us into their busy lives. Thanks also to Stephanie Jones, Eve-Anne Doohan, Cheryl Beardslee, Chelsea Siler, Catherine Swanson, and Charmaine Barga for their help in conducting this study.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH42484), the National Institute for Nursing Research (2 P30 NR04001), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P30 HD02274), and the

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