Parental Emotion Socialization: The Roles of Fathers, Parental Gender Attitudes, and Child Temperament

Research suggests that emotional competence has important implications for multiple aspects of adjustment, including psychological well-being, social functioning, and academic achievement. Therefore, researchers’ attention has been directed to the socialization of children's emotion knowledge and regulatory skills. Most of this work, however, has focused on the direct links between mothers’ emotion socialization practices and child outcomes, and little is known about (a) whether socializers other than mothers play a unique role in children’s emotional development; (b) how parents’ socialization values may affect their emotion socialization practices; and (c) how parents’ emotion socialization may interact with children's characteristics to affect child outcomes. Grounded in theories of fathering, gender socialization, and differential susceptibility, the goal of the proposed study is to fill some of these gaps in the literature by examining (a) whether fathers’ and mothers’ emotion socialization practices independently contribute to children’s emotional competence; (b) how parents’ gender role attitudes may shape their emotion socialization practices for sons and daughters and; (c) how child temperament may moderate the links between parental emotion socialization practices and child emotional adjustment.

Funding Source: RGC - Early Career Scheme (ECS)