The link between maternal emotion socialization practices and Turkish preschoolers’ emotion regulation: moderating roles of paternal emotional support

Abstract

Studies examining the link between parents’ emotion socialization practices and children’s emotional competence generally consider mothers as primary caregivers and thus ignore fathers’ roles in this process. However, especially in the recent years there is an increase in the father’s involvement in the child rearing practices. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the interactive roles of maternal and paternal socialization practices in the development of emotion regulation skills of preschool children. For this purpose, data were gathered from 149 mother-father dyads who have children between 30 and 84 months of age, through self-report measures of parental emotion socialization practices as well as children’s emotion regulation skills. Results of the moderation analyses indicated that higher maternal support reported by mothers was associated with significant increases in children’s emotion regulation only in the children whose fathers show low support. In contrast, when paternal support was high, the role of mothers’ supportive emotion socialization practices on children’s emotion regulation was non-significant. The results emphasized the importance of the supportive emotion socialization practices of at least one parent for the children’s emotional development.