Young Children's Emotion Regulation and Social Skills: The Role of Maternal Emotional Socialization and Mother-Child Interactional Synchrony

TL;DRAbstract

The present study examined parent-child interactional synchrony and parents' socialization of emotion as predictors of young children's social and emotional functioning. Participants were 136 children aged 3 to 6 years (80 males, 56 females) and their mothers. Mothers' reports of their typical reactions to their children's negative emotional expressions and of their children's emotion regulation and social skills were attained. Mother-child dyads engaged in a free play task and a structured teaching task that were coded for interactional synchrony. Results revealed that mothers' distress reactions to children's negative emotions predicted emotion regulation difficulties in children, while mothers' minimizing reactions predicted weaker prosocial skills (i.e., cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control) in children. Mothers' expressive encouragement reactions predicted children's cooperation and assertion skills. Children with fewer emotion regulation difficulties exhibited

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