engleski

Association between parental behaviors and emotion regulation strategies in early adolescence

Research shows that characteristics of parents and families are important predictors of different aspects of child development. In early adolescence the family still plays an important role in a child’s emotional development. In this study we examined, seven different parental behaviours broadly grouped into three dimensions: Parental Support, Restrictive Control, and Permissiveness and their link with emotion regulation strategies of early adolescents. , Successful emotion regulation plays an important role for a child’s overall emotional development and the use of certain regulatory strategy partly depends on parents’ behaviour in the family context. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the contributions of different perceived parenting behaviours of mothers and fathers in predicting children’s emotion regulation strategies in early adolescence. The research was conducted as a part of project „Child Well-Being in Family Context” study financed by Croatian Science Foundation. The sample consisted of 172 children (44.8% girls, Mage = 10.16, SD = 0.87) who attended 3rd (30%), 4th (35%), and 5th (35%) grade of primary school. The survey, consisted of a comprehensive battery of questionnaires related to child’s personality, well-being, technology use and parenting styles, and among others, children completed also questionnaires about their perceived mother’s and father’s behaviours (Parental Behaviour Questionnaire) and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire The questionnaires were administered in class. Research so far shows that generally warm parenting has positive links with adaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, while psychological control has positive links with nonadaptive emotion regulation strategies, i.e., expressive suppression. Our analyses revealed that positive mother’s and father's parenting behaviours predicted higher children’s use of cognitive reappraisal. Restrictive control predicted higher expressive suppression usage. Results are interpreted in line with emotion socialization theories and theory of change which links parental behaviours with children’s emotion regulation strategies, therefore different characteristics of the family context can support or undermine child's emotion regulation development.

Parental behaviors, Emotion regulation strategies, Early adolescence, Children

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