Emotions can be conceived as systems that regulate actions in ways that serve a person’s concerns (Frijda, Reference Frijda1986). They establish, maintain, or disrupt individually significant relations between a person and the internal or external environment (Campos et al., Reference Campos, Camras, Lee, He and Campos2018). Understanding how emotions regulate a person’s actions in social contexts opens up a sophisticated approach to how emotions develop over the course of ontogenesis from biologically given precursor emotions to a repertoire of differentiated emotions that the developing child becomes increasingly aware of. This awareness of one’s own and others’ feelings can be seen as a prerequisite for a volitionally driven regulation of one’s own emotions. Parents play a pivotal role in this development, which can be conceptualized as a transition from comprehensive coregulation of an infant’s emotions and behaviors to increasing self-regulation of emotions and actions by the growing child. This chapter highlights these interwoven developmental trajectories and gives an overview of how parents contribute to them. The first section focuses on the development of emotions, and the second section on the development of a reflective form of emotion regulation. The third section provides an outlook on further research questions that follows from the described state-of-the-art.

7.1 Development of Emotions

7.2 Development of a Reflective Form of Emotion Regulation

7.2.2 Emotional Awareness and Acquisition of Emotion Regulation Strategies

The acquisition of a reflective mode of emotion regulation is an endeavor that takes one’s whole childhood and consists of at least two intertwined abilities: (1) transitioning unreflective emotions into reflective emotions, that is, becoming aware of one’s own and others’ emotions and (2) acquiring emotion regulation strategies and using them appropriately. Most recent parental intervention programs, such as Tuning in to Kids, Parent–Child Interaction Therapy-Emotion Development and Emotion Enhanced Triple P, address both abilities (but in slightly different terms) with empirically confirmed success, especially concerning improved parenting behavior (England-Mason & Gonzalez, Reference England-Mason and Gonzalez2020).

7.2.2.1 Transitioning Unreflective Emotions into Reflective Emotions

The ability to perform this transition has been already described in Section 7.1.2, Trajectories of Emotional Development. Becoming aware of a currently felt emotion and understanding its relational meaning in the specific context enables children to psychologically distance themselves from the spontaneous action readiness of the felt emotion; this distancing facilitates the selection and application of an appropriate regulation strategy. However, only a few intervention programs explicitly mention the strategy of affect mirroring as a first step in triggering emotional awareness (Silkenbeumer et al., Reference Silkenbeumer, Schiller, Holodynski and Kärtner2016). Most of them start with the second step, labeling, exploring, and validating the inferred feeling of the child, which is suitable only when the child is already aware of their feelings (England-Mason & Gonzalez, Reference England-Mason and Gonzalez2020; Gottman et al., Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1997).

7.2.2.2 Acquiring Emotion Regulation Strategies

Gross and Thompson (Reference Gross, Thompson and Gross2007) distinguish four classes of regulation strategies: distraction, reappraisal, soothing, and response modulation. These strategies have their primary impact at different points in the emotion-generative process, but any of these strategies can lead to the desired behavioral outcome, that is, effective emotion regulation. For instance, whereas distraction strategies shift the focus to a new event that establishes a new line of consecutive emotion-generative processes (e.g. appraisal, action readiness, feeling) resulting in a different emotion, response modulation strategies directly operate on the level of the behavioral inclination and either inhibit the impulse or transform it to an appropriate response.

During the preschool years, children establish an increasing repertoire of effective emotion regulation strategies. Early in the second year, a significant developmental achievement can be seen in social referencing and the self-initiation of interpersonal regulation. Hence, an intentional search for social support is considered a rudimentary form of self-regulation. During the second and third years, there is a transition from using passive to more active strategies of emotion regulation, and, as a consequence, the two first truly self-initiated strategies emerge, namely distracting oneself from emotion-eliciting events and self-soothing (Bridges & Grolnick, Reference Bridges, Grolnick and Eisenberg1995; Calkins & Hill, Reference Calkins, Hill and Gross2007; Spinrad et al., Reference Spinrad, Stifter, Donelan-McCall and Turner2004).

During preschool years, children learn advanced forms of mentalizing (Matthews et al., Reference Matthews, Biney and Abbot-Smith2018) and self-distancing (Grenell et al., Reference Grenell, Prager, Schaefer, Kross, Duckworth and Carlson2019) that enables them to become aware of their emotional and motivational action readiness and to inhibit and modify them by applying a regulation strategy on them. The latter ability is also called “hot executive functions” because they are directed to emotional and motivational action readiness and their volitional inhibition and modification in contrast to “cool executive functions” that are directed to thoughts and actions and their volitional inhibition and modification (Zelazo et al., Reference Zelazo, Qu, Müller, Schneider, Schumann-Hengsteler and Sodian2005). Together with further sociocognitive achievements, such as normative development that enables thinking based on rules and social norms (Rakoczy & Schmidt, Reference Rakoczy and Schmidt2013), children refine their skills to modulate emotionally triggered behavioral inclinations, and they acquire increasingly complex cognitive regulation strategies, such as reappraisal strategies, that allow them to satisfy their motives in socially coordinated and accepted ways. Regulation of behavior and emotions that are disapproved of can also be achieved by acquiring and eliciting moral emotions such as compassion, shame, and guilt, which trigger a strong readiness to override the ostracized behavior (Hofmann & Doan, Reference Hofmann, Doan, Hofmann and Doan2018).

The acquisition of emotion regulation strategies can also be described as a shift from coregulation to self-regulation, as was already stated for the action regulating function of emotions. The internalization model of reflective emotion regulation addresses the gradual transition that occurs as a child acquires increasingly self-regulated levels of emotion regulation (Silkenbeumer et al., Reference Silkenbeumer, Schiller, Holodynski and Kärtner2016, Reference Silkenbeumer, Schiller and Kärtner2018). During infancy and early childhood, parents’ and other caregivers’ focus is primarily on coregulation by their child’s emotions, that is, they interpret their child’s emotion expressions as appeals to carry out suitable actions on behalf of the child. However, as children grow older, parents increasingly start to apply coregulation of their child’s emotions, as defined previously, when they use distraction or soothing strategies when the intended action would be infeasible or inappropriate, for example, when a young child starts crying because their father prevents them from picking up a sharp knife, as it would be inappropriate to let the child have the knife. In social interaction, parents introduce culturally generated emotion regulation strategies that, in the course of development, their child can adopt and internalize as mental functions.

The internalization model of reflective emotion regulation (Silkenbeumer et al., Reference Silkenbeumer, Schiller, Holodynski and Kärtner2016) postulates three different levels that specify the strategies used by parents and the implications that these levels have for child development (see also Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 The internalization model of reflective emotion regulation

At Level 1 (substitutional emotion regulation), parents adopt all components of reflective emotion regulation. Thus, it is the parent who becomes aware of their child’s emotion by mirroring it, understands its significance and decides whether and how an emotion needs to be regulated, and does so where necessary, for example, by soothing or distracting the child.

At Level 2 (specific prompts), parents start prompting the child to carry out simple actions that enable a modification of the emotion in question. More specifically, coregulation is characterized by providing specific prompts that the child should follow. This might, for example, be an instruction to follow a specific rule (e.g. to take turns), to take a deep breath, or to play with the building blocks instead of the ball. This level of coregulation helps the child to establish a basic repertoire of effective behavioral routines to regulate emotions. Children can adopt the used strategy, the verbal instructions, into their repertoire by instructing themselves how to behave in order to regulate an elicited emotion.

At Level 3 (metacognitive prompts), caregivers use metacognitive prompts that leave the generation, selection, and application of strategies to the child: more specifically, caregivers prompt the child either to choose from a set of alternative appraisals or responses and execute the self-chosen alternative or to generate alternative appraisals or behavioral responses. This level of coregulation supports the child in flexibly exploring and evaluating alternative regulation strategies and in choosing and executing a specific regulation strategy from a set of possible responses.

Through these different levels of coregulation, children regulate emotions in increasingly self-regulated ways: they become aware of their inner feeling states (starting at Level 1), they establish a repertoire of effective strategies to regulate emotions (starting at Level 2), and they start to generate alternative strategies and select and enact one of these alternatives (starting at Level 3). Unlike other approaches (e.g. Crick & Dodge, Reference Crick and Dodge1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, Reference Lemerise and Arsenio2000), this model postulates a formative phase in which self-regulation is critically constituted by the way in which caregivers coregulate emotionally challenging episodes.

7.3 Outlook

The aim of this chapter was to embed the development of emotion and emotion regulation in a broader sociocultural context by emphasizing the constitutive role of culturally saturated social interaction between caregivers and their children. At the same time, the proposed models are normative in that they clearly focus on children’s explicit emotional awareness and reflective, rational forms of emotion regulation, which is a specific approach to emotion regulation that characterizes Western cultures (Kärtner et al., Reference Kärtner, Holodynski and Wörmann2013; Keller & Kärtner, Reference Keller, Kärtner, Gelfand, Chiu and Hong2013). As outlined in this chapter, becoming aware of feelings is fostered through specific parenting strategies in the coregulation of children’s emotions, especially affect mirroring, modeling, labeling, and validating children’s emotions. Later in development, caregivers help children to build an increasingly complex repertoire of regulation strategies by supporting emotion regulation at different levels through the provision of specific and, when appropriate, metacognitive prompts. Most of the recent parental intervention programs mentioned here consider one or more of these prerequisites. Based on this framework, we highlight three important directions for future research.

Though many questions remain about the specific ways in which emotion regulatory processes function in the context of relationships across the life span (Zaki & Williams, Reference Zaki and Williams2013), it is well understood that emotion regulation is prominently socialized with caregivers, in the context of children’s first relationships (Diaz & Eisenberg, Reference Diaz and Eisenberg2015; Kiel & Kalomiris, Reference Kiel and Kalomiris2015; Murray et al., Reference Murray, Rosanbalm, Christopoulos and Meyer2019). From birth through adolescence, parents play a critical role in supporting children’s development of their intrinsic capacity to regulate their own emotions (Dozier et al., Reference Dozier, Roben, Caron, Hoye and Bernard2018; Gianino & Tronick, Reference Gianino, Tronick, Field, McCabe and Schneiderman1988; Hofer, Reference Hofer1994; Katz & Hunter, Reference Katz and Hunter2007; Pratt et al., Reference Pratt, Singer, Kanat-Maymon and Feldman2015), and the impact of this socialization is profound (Tan et al., Reference Tan, Oppenheimer, Ladouceur, Butterfield and Silk2020). The ability to regulate one’s emotions effectively has been found to buffer individuals from developing psychopathology later in life (e.g. Kim & Cicchetti, Reference Kim and Cicchetti2010), and, conversely, emotion regulation difficulties in childhood are associated with behavioral problems across the life span (e.g. Halligan et al., Reference Halligan, Cooper, Fearon, Wheeler, Crosby and Murray2013).

Children undergo a dramatic shift from full reliance on parents for external regulation in infancy to the intrinsic capacity for self-regulation later in development (Grolnick et al., Reference Grolnick, McMenamy, Kurowski, Balter and Tamis-LeMonda2006; Thompson & Goodman, Reference Thompson, Goodman, Kring and Sloan2010). Paralleling this shift, the nature of parents’ specific role in scaffolding children’s emotion regulation also shifts as children mature (see Gee & Cohodes, Reference Gee and Cohodes2021). Despite the dynamic nature of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation, across development and even into adulthood, parents consistently exert a powerful influence on children’s socioemotional development via both implicit and explicit efforts to teach children to identify, express, and regulate emotions (Saarni, Reference Saarni1999).

In this chapter, we employ a neurobehavioral lens to focus on parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation as a key construct of parental emotion socialization. We begin by grounding our understanding of the critical role of parents in assisting children in regulating emotions in the cross-species literature delineating the neurobiological underpinnings of parental involvement in children’s emotion regulation. With this framework in place, we next review the current literature on parental assistance with children’s emotions – with a focus on Gottman’s meta-emotion philosophy – and review associations between parental beliefs about the optimal role of parents in assisting children in regulating their emotions – at the non-strategy-specific level – and children’s developmental outcomes. Third, we discuss the importance of a new line of research focused on assessing parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation at the strategy-specific level and review recent advances in the measurement of this construct. Finally, we discuss future directions in the study of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation, with an emphasis on the development of additional and more varied measurement tools, establishment of normative trajectories of parental assistance with children’s execution of specific strategies, and investigation of neurobiological bases of parental assistance with child emotion regulation – at the strategy-specific level – across development.

8.1 Neurobiological Bases of Parental Assistance with Children’s Emotion Regulation

Humans have evolved to expect the presence of a predictable, safe, and supportive caregiver, and decades of research have demonstrated the importance of such relationships early in life in supporting children’s healthy socioemotional (for a review, see Gee & Cohodes, Reference Gee and Cohodes2021), cognitive, and behavioral development (Ellis et al., Reference Ellis, Figueredo, Brumbach and Schlomer2009; Gee, Reference Gee2020; Glynn & Baram, Reference Glynn and Baram2019; Mason et al., Reference Mason, Goldstein and Schwade2019; Tottenham, Reference Tottenham2012). Burgeoning cross-species evidence suggests that caregivers directly affect children’s emotional development by influencing the neurobiological systems that govern emotion regulation (Callaghan et al., Reference Callaghan, Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2019; Callaghan & Tottenham, Reference Callaghan and Tottenham2016; Gee, Reference Gee2016; Gee et al., Reference Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2014; Gunnar & Donzella, Reference Gunnar and Donzella2002; Hostinar et al., Reference Hostinar, Johnson and Gunnar2015; Tottenham, Reference Tottenham2015). Corticolimbic circuitry, specifically the amygdala, involved in detecting emotionally salient stimuli in the environment; the hippocampus, a structure central to learning and memory; and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which is implicated in regulating amygdala reactivity, may be particularly susceptible to caregiving influences. Specifically, the presence of a caregiver has been shown to both reduce hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity by suppressing cortisol activity (Hostinar et al., Reference Hostinar, Sullivan and Gunnar2014) and to modulate mPFC-amygdala connectivity such that amygdala reactivity to emotionally-valenced stimuli is suppressed in the presence of a caregiver (Gee et al., Reference Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2014). These results echo findings from the animal literature that caregiver presence suppresses corticosterone and amygdala activity in rodent pups (Moriceau & Sullivan, Reference Moriceau and Sullivan2006) and, together, set up the basis of our understanding of the salient biological influence of caregiver presence on the capacity for self-regulation among offspring.

Further, the neurobiological bases of caregiver involvement in extrinsic regulation of children’s emotions are dynamic and likely change across development (Callaghan et al., Reference Callaghan, Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2019; Callaghan & Tottenham, Reference Callaghan and Tottenham2016; Gee, Reference Gee2016; Gee & Casey, Reference Gee and Casey2015; Gee et al., Reference Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2014; Gunnar & Donzella, Reference Gunnar and Donzella2002; Hostinar et al., Reference Hostinar, Johnson and Gunnar2015; Tottenham, Reference Tottenham2015). When corticolimbic circuitry is still developing, caregivers exert a critical external regulatory function (Callaghan & Tottenham, Reference Callaghan and Tottenham2016; Gee, Reference Gee2016; Gee et al., Reference Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2014). However, across development, the centrality of caregivers’ provision of extrinsic regulation may fade as children become more reliant on intrinsic regulatory capacities and as other attachment figures outside of the nuclear family take on increased salience in the coregulatory relationships of an adolescent (Gee, Reference Gee2016; Hostinar et al., Reference Hostinar, Sullivan and Gunnar2014; see Figure 8.1). In other words, there may be a normative decrease in the potency of a caregiver’s presence on child emotion regulation across human development, such that parents are able to provide more significant extrinsic regulation of neurobiological correlates of offspring emotion (e.g. amygdala reactivity or cortisol reactivity) in younger versus more mature youth (Gee et al., Reference Gee, Gabard-Durnam, Telzer, Humphreys, Goff, Shapiro, Flannery, Lumian, Fareri, Caldera and Tottenham2014; Hostinar et al., Reference Hostinar, Johnson and Gunnar2015). This line of research has underscored the key role of parents in modulating child emotion regulatory capacities – merely by their presence in children’s lives – and has highlighted potential neurobiological processes underlying parental facilitation of children’s emerging emotion regulation; however, key questions remain in this line of work to fully understand how parental support of children’s emotion regulation “gets under the skin.” As we review in this chapter, advances in this area will likely by rooted in a bridging of biological and behavioral inquiries related to parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation.

Figure 8.1 Caregiver influences on corticolimbic circuitry underlying emotion regulation across development. Evidence from both human and animal studies points to a potential sensitive period, spanning infancy and toddlerhood, during which caregiver inputs to the developing brain may have a particularly salient impact on the development of corticolimbic circuitry underlying emotion regulation. Specifically, caregiver inputs that are predictable and that are associated with safety may promote healthy neurodevelopment such that caregivers are able to support youth emotion regulation via modulation of this circuitry in later developmental stages. During infancy and toddlerhood, caregivers play a central role in regulating human amygdala function. As corticolimbic circuitry (e.g., functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala) matures, children experience a shift from greater reliance on extrinsic emotion regulation (e.g., caregiving influences) to greater reliance on intrinsic emotion regulation. This transition also corresponds to a shift in the role of the caregiver in supporting the child’s development, as the child faces novel tasks and compounding developmental challenges at each stage.

Figure reproduced with permission from Gee & Cohodes, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2021.

8.2 Correlates of Parental Assistance with Children’s Emotion Regulation: The Broad Influence of Gottman’s Meta-emotion Philosophy

A substantial body of work has elucidated processes by which parents socialize their children’s emotional development by assisting children in effectively regulating their emotions. Perhaps most notably, Gottman’s extensive work on parental meta-emotion philosophy posits that parents have an organized set of beliefs about children’s emotions, including their awareness, acceptance, and assistance with regulation of their children’s negative emotions. These beliefs underlie specific parental behaviors in response to children’s displays of negative affect, and, in turn, Gottman’s theory posits, these beliefs exert a powerful influence on child development, shaping myriad developmental outcomes ranging from biological responsivity to stress to cognitive development (Gottman et al., Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1997; Katz & Windecker-Nelson, Reference Katz and Windecker-Nelson2004).

The parental awareness tenet of Gottman’s tripartite meta-emotion philosophy refers to a parent’s receptivity to a child’s emotional displays encompassing the degree to which parents recognize, describe, and demonstrate engagement with children’s emotions. Parental acceptance describes the degree to which parents are comfortable with a child’s emotions, and the parental assistance tenet specifically refers to the degree to which parents engage in assisting their children in identifying the emotions they are experiencing, show respect for their children’s expression of emotion, and actively engage in helping children cope with situations that elicit negative emotions for children using developmentally-appropriate regulation strategies (Gottman et al., Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1996, Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1997). Within the Gottman framework, parents who exhibit high levels of awareness, acceptance, and assistance of their children’s negative emotions view their children’s displays of negative emotion as opportunities to promote increased and more varied use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies, to build intimacy with their children, and to scaffold their child’s development of coping strategies when faced with situations that may trigger negative emotions.

Among typically-developing children, children whose parents exhibit high levels of awareness, acceptance, and assistance with their children’s negative emotions have been found to exhibit a relatively increased capacity for self-regulation (e.g. more adaptive physiological reactivity to stress, more facility in employing emotion regulation skills, higher levels of effortful control), as well as lower levels of externalizing and internalizing problems, and better academic performance and cognitive function (Brajša-Žganec, Reference Brajša-Žganec2014; Chen et al., Reference Chen, Lin and Li2012; Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, Hagan, Lieberman and Dimmler2016; Gerhardt et al., Reference Gerhardt, Feng, Wu, Hooper, Ku and Chan2020; Gottman et al., Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1996; Katz & Hunter, Reference Katz and Hunter2007). Sampling from this broad literature, in a longitudinal study that followed children from preschool to middle childhood, children whose parents exhibited high levels of awareness, acceptance, and assistance with their children’s negative emotions – namely anger and sadness – had higher levels of inhibitory control, higher rates of academic achievement, and better physical health, relative to their counterparts whose parents did not exhibit such a meta-emotion profile (Gottman et al., Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1996). Relative to children whose parents engaged in lower levels of awareness, acceptance, and assistance with children’s negative emotions, both preschool-age and school-age children of parents who engaged in higher levels of these three meta-emotion strategies were found to have better peer relationships (Denham et al., Reference Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach and Blair1997; Hooven et al., Reference Hooven, Gottman and Katz1995), suggesting that parental assistance with negative emotions – as an aspect of a parent’s working meta-emotion philosophy – may promote children’s adaptive socioemotional functioning across development. It is important to note that associations between parental meta-emotion philosophy and children’s self-regulation and socioemotional functioning may also be driven by shared genetic variance between parents and children (e.g. Wang & Saudino, Reference Wang and Saudino2013). Future studies should aim to disentangle these factors via empirical research that examines a range of psychobiological factors in the context of parental influences on children’s emotion regulation.

In addition, several studies have examined the function of parental assistance with children’s negative emotions in clinical populations, most notably among children exposed to stress. Parents who engage in high levels of awareness, acceptance, and assistance with their children’s negative emotions may more effectively buffer children from developing both internalizing and externalizing problems following exposure to trauma (Johnson & Lieberman, Reference Johnson and Lieberman2007; Katz & Windecker-Nelson, Reference Katz and Windecker-Nelson2006). Parental assistance with children’s negative emotions, specifically, appears to be an important driver of this effect such that high levels of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation appear to moderate the effect of stress on children’s development of symptomatology (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, Chen and Lieberman2017, Reference Cohodes, McCauley and Gee2021; Katz & Windecker-Nelson, Reference Katz and Windecker-Nelson2006). Current theory posits that this buffering effect may be due to the fact that parents’ baseline tendency to assist their children with engaging in effective emotion regulation may bolster children’s intrinsic capacity for regulation of negative emotion during periods of heightened stress (Ellis et al., Reference Ellis, Alisic, Reiss, Dishion and Fisher2014; Wu et al., Reference Wu, Feng, Yan, Hooper, Gerhardt and Ku2020).

Although the parental assistance component of Gottman’s meta-emotion philosophy has served as a key foundation for questions about the effects of parental support of children’s emotion regulation on child development, this line of research has been limited by the fact that Gottman’s parental assistance construct encompasses both parental beliefs and behaviors related to children’s displays of negative emotion. Thus, studies relying solely on Gottman-based coding of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation render it difficult to isolate correlates of direct parental assistance of children’s regulation of their own emotions, and, further, parental assistance with specific emotion regulatory strategies, which has motivated recent advances in assessment of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation.

8.3 Parental Assistance with Children’s Emotion Regulation at the Strategy-Specific Level: Advances in Measurement of the Construct

In addition to Gottman’s meta-emotion philosophy framework, multiple assessment tools have been validated to measure parental beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in response to children’s negative emotions. For example, the Parents’ Beliefs about Children’s Emotions Questionnaire (Halberstadt et al., Reference Halberstadt, Dunsmore, Bryant, Parker, Beale and Thompson2013) assesses the degree to which parents believe that children’s negative emotions are valuable or dangerous. The Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (Fabes et al., Reference Fabes, Eisenberg and Bernzweig1990) assesses parents’ tendency to react to displays of negative emotions with expressive encouragement or punishment by querying parental responses to a series of vignettes. In addition, several measures assess parental awareness of their children’s own internal emotion regulatory processes. For example, based on Gottman’s meta-emotion philosophy, the Emotion-Related Parenting Styles Self-Test (Hakim-Larson et al., Reference Hakim-Larson, Parker, Lee, Goodwin and Voelker2006) queries parents’ perception of their children’s awareness of negative emotion and receptivity to discussing emotional content with others. Despite this growing area of research and the number of assessment tools available to query parental beliefs, awareness, and behaviors related to children’s emotions, there is a dearth of research on parental assistance with children’s execution of specific emotion regulation strategies.

Further, increasingly, evidence from studies comparing the adaptive function of different emotion regulatory strategies among adults has indicated that certain strategies (e.g. reappraisal, problem-solving, acceptance) are more effective at changing an individual’s affective state (Aldao & Christensen, Reference Aldao and Christensen2015), as compared to other strategies (e.g. suppression, rumination, and avoidance), which have been conceptualized as dysfunctional strategies due to their theorized contribution to the development of psychopathology (e.g. Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, Reference Aldao and Nolen-Hoeksema2010). Despite empirical support for associations between a variety of strategies and the development of psychopathology (e.g. Aldao et al., Reference Aldao and Nolen-Hoeksema2010; Izadpanah et al., Reference Izadpanah, Schumacher, Bähr, Stopsack, Grabe and Barnow2016; Ruiz, Reference Ruiz2010), the majority of current measures of emotion regulation only assess a small subset of strategies (e.g. Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [Gross & John, Reference Gross and John2003]; Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents [Gullone & Taffe, Reference Gullone and Taffe2012]; Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale [Gratz & Roemer, Reference Gratz and Roemer2004]; Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [Garnefski et al., Reference Garnefski, Kraaij and Spinhoven2002]).

Representing a major advance in this line of work, the recently-developed Parental Assistance with Children’s Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, Preece, McCauley, Rogers, Gross and Gee2022) assesses parental assistance of child emotion regulation from birth to age 17 across 10 different strategies spanning each phase of the extended process model (Gross, Reference Gross1998, Reference Gross2015) of emotion regulation. The PACER queries 50 caregiver-rated items (e.g. I help my child solve problems that are causing those feelings) that comprise five items querying each of the following strategies: acceptance, avoidance, behavioral disengagement, distraction, expressive suppression, problem-solving, reappraisal, rumination, social support search, and venting. To our knowledge, the PACER is the first instrument that comprehensively measures parental extrinsic emotion regulation via assessing parental assistance with children’s deployment of specific emotion regulation strategies.

Development of this tool has afforded a preliminary exploration of associations between parents’ tendency to support specific emotion regulation strategies and children’s developmental outcomes. Initial results from the first two validation studies of this instrument have begun to further our understanding of the correlates of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation at the strategy-specific level. Specifically, results of the initial validation study of the PACER suggest that parental assistance with their children’s execution of a certain emotion regulation strategy (e.g. reappraisal) is significantly associated with parents’ intrinsic use of that strategy to regulate their own emotions (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, McCauley and Gee2021). In addition, preliminary results suggest that parents who broadly report high levels of scaffolding their children’s use of prototypically-maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g. expressive suppression, rumination), coupled with low levels of scaffolding their children’s engagement with prototypically-adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g. reappraisal), were more likely to report difficulty regulating their own negative emotions, poorer parent-child attachment quality, poorer meta-emotion and broad attunement to their children’s emotional experience, more negative reactions to their children’s displays of emotions, as well as higher levels of stress and psychopathology (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, McCauley and Gee2021). These associations between parent-level factors and parental behavior regarding support of their children’s deployment of specific emotion regulation strategies motivate more thorough examination of the myriad influences on parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation, which is likely to have important implications for both prevention and intervention efforts in clinical settings.

Relative to parents who reported high levels of assistance with children’s regulation using prototypically adaptive strategies, parents who engaged in higher levels of assistance with children’s deployment of maladaptive strategies also reported higher levels of symptomatology among their children (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, McCauley and Gee2021). In addition, both validation studies to date provide evidence for age-related effects of caregiver assistance with specific emotion regulation strategies. In a sample of children under 5, child age was significantly positively correlated with parental assistance with problem-solving, reappraisal, and venting (Mancini et al., Reference Mancini, Heritage, Preece, Cohodes, Gross, Gee and Finlay-Jones2022). Further, the association between parental assistance with execution of specific strategies and children’s symptomatology appeared to be age specific such that, among younger children (aged 1.5–5), caregivers’ increased assistance with problem-solving, social support search, acceptance, and venting were associated with lower levels of both child internalizing and externalizing problems; conversely, among children aged 6–17, caregivers’ increased assistance with a different set of strategies (rumination and expressive suppression) were associated with increased symptomatology (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, McCauley and Gee2021). Taken together, these findings suggest that, consistent with the dynamic role of caregivers in modulating neurobiological bases of emotion regulation, parental assistance with children’s execution of emotion regulation strategies – at the behavioral and strategy-specific level – may vary as a function of child age.

One primary question surrounding parents’ scaffolding of children’s emotion regulation – at the strategy-specific level – is whether parents’ support of a broad range of specific strategies may cluster together, and, in turn, whether there are meaningful correlates of a parent’s tendency to engage in supporting a specific cluster of strategies versus another. In the second validation study of the PACER, Mancini and colleagues (Reference Mancini, Heritage, Preece, Cohodes, Gross, Gee and Finlay-Jones2022) found that caregivers of children under 5 could indeed be effectively clustered into three groups pertaining to the degree to which parents reported supporting their child’s use of each of the 10 strategies queried by the PACER. This clustering analysis yielded three significant profiles: parents who assisted their children with “mostly adaptive” strategies (i.e. parents who reported above-average assistance with children’s execution of problem-solving, social support search, reappraisal, acceptance, and venting and who reported below-average assistance with children’s execution of behavioral disengagement, rumination, distraction, expression suppression, and avoidance); parents who assisted their children with “mostly maladaptive” strategies (i.e. parents who reported above-average assistance with children’s execution of behavioral disengagement, rumination, expressive suppression, and avoidance and who reported below-average support for problem-solving, social support search, reappraisal, acceptance, and venting); and, finally, parents who assisted their children with “mixed strategies” (i.e. parents who reported above-average assistance with children’s use of all strategies except for expressive suppression, which was below average; Mancini et al., Reference Mancini, Heritage, Preece, Cohodes, Gross, Gee and Finlay-Jones2022). Though correlates of assignment to a specific cluster of regulation strategies have yet to be examined empirically, this initial research invites future interrogation of family-level factors that predict and are associated with parents’ tendency to assist children in engaging with certain regulatory strategies.

Also of note, findings from the first validation study of the PACER revealed that parents’ more generalized beliefs about their children’s emotions were related to many PACER scales representing parental assistance with children’s adoption of specific, isolated emotion regulation strategies (Cohodes et al., Reference Cohodes, Preece, McCauley, Rogers, Gross and Gee2022). Parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation may be particularly nuanced such that parental assistance with specific strategies may not map onto highly related and aforementioned constructs such as Gottman’s meta-emotion philosophy. Therefore, assessment of parents’ specific profiles of assistance with a broader range of prototypically adaptive and maladaptive strategies is likely to yield a more detailed understanding of the complex ways in which parental assistance with emotion regulation influences child development.

Though preliminary, development of the PACER establishes a foundation for future studies to examine developmental trajectories of children’s reliance on parental support for the execution of specific regulation strategies from infancy through adolescence. Results to date point to complex interactive effects between child age and strategy type and underscore a potential mechanism by which parental socialization of specific emotion regulation strategies may confer risk for children’s development of psychopathology (or, alternatively, may suggest that children with relatively higher levels of symptomatology may elicit more parental assistance with emotion regulation). Additional research using novel measures that assess parental assistance at the strategy-specific level is needed to understand these complex patterns.

8.4 Future Directions in the Study of Parental Assistance with Children’s Emotion Regulation

Despite recent advances in the study of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation, several key questions remain. First, with regard to measurement, paralleling the development of the PACER, development of assessment tools that query the degree to which youth engage in a variety of emotion regulation strategies (spanning all phases of the extended process model) will allow researchers to investigate concordance between parental assistance of children’s execution of specific strategies and children’s actual use of these strategies. Further, a child-report version of an instrument like the PACER that measures the degree to which children perceive their parent to be assisting them in executing specific emotion regulation strategies will also enrich our understanding of the association between parents’ self-reported tendencies to support children and children’s actual adoption of strategies. Ecological momentary assessment is gaining traction in the broader study of emotion (Colombo et al., Reference Colombo, Fernández-Álvarez, Suso-Ribera, Cipresso, Valev, Leufkens, Sas, Garcia-Palacios, Riva and Botella2020; Gee & Caballero, Reference Gee and Caballero2019) and will likely be a critical tool in further understanding the real-time, dynamic processes by which parents assist their children in executing specific emotion regulation strategies. In addition, the PACER focuses on assessment of parental assistance with a broad range of children’s negative emotions. Future assessment tools should aim to quantify the degree to which parents assist their children in regulating emotions at the level of discrete emotions.

As it is well understood that parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation is a dynamic process that varies as a function of child age, future studies should focus on furthering our understanding of the developmental time course of parental assistance with specific emotion regulation strategies. Querying parental assistance with specific emotion regulation strategies in longitudinal samples of children and parents beginning in infancy and spanning adolescence will yield insight into the unique normative developmental time courses for parental assistance with specific strategies. Collecting behavioral data regarding parental tendency to support their children’s use of certain strategies in conjunction with neuroimaging data will allow for mapping of the behavioral correlates of parental assistance with emotion regulation onto observed changes in parents’ modulation of corticolimbic circuitry across development. Utilizing a multimodal approach to understand how parents, specifically, support their children’s adoption of specific emotion regulation strategies will yield important insight into the ways in which the quality or frequency of parental assistance with emotion regulation affects developing neural circuitry.

Establishment of normative developmental curves for parental assistance with specific strategies will also lay the foundation for understanding how these processes may go awry in the context of stress exposure or in clinical populations. With an established understanding of normative parental assistance with specific emotion regulation strategies, researchers and clinicians alike will be better poised to identify parental assistance with emotion regulation as a treatment target in the context of both prevention and intervention efforts and to track changes in profiles of parental assistance over time and during treatment. Relatedly, future studies that begin to examine both parent- and child-related correlates of parental tendency to support certain clusters of regulation strategies (Mancini et al., Reference Mancini, Heritage, Preece, Cohodes, Gross, Gee and Finlay-Jones2022) will enable screening for potentially problematic patterns of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation in clinical populations.

In conclusion, the study of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation is at a critical juncture. Our knowledge of both the neurobiological underpinnings of parental modulation of children’s emotion regulation, and the correlates of generalized parental assistance with emotion regulation, have laid the foundation for more nuanced measurement of parental assistance with emotion regulation at the strategy-specific level. The next wave of research that bridges the neurobiological and behavioral study of the effects of parental assistance with children’s emotion regulation promises to unveil deeper understanding about the myriad ways in which parents shape child development via involvement in the emotional lives of their children.

Decades of research indicate that the constructs of emotion and emotion regulation are critical for a wide range of developmental outcomes in childhood (see Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Eggum, Reference Eisenberg, Spinrad and Eggum2010). Caregivers undoubtedly affect the experience and expression of children’s emotions and their regulation, and consequently, such socialization processes have important implications for children’s subsequent emotional and social competence. In this chapter, we first present our theoretical model of the socialization of emotion and discuss relevant literature supporting the relations of various parental emotion-related socialization behaviors to children’s emotion-related outcomes. We next discuss potential moderators involved in these relations and conclude with a focus on intervention and prevention efforts and areas for future research.

9.1 A Heuristic Model of Emotion Socialization

Emotion socialization refers to the processes involved in the ways that socializers teach about and affect children’s experience, expression, and regulation of their emotions and emotion-related behaviors. Eisenberg and colleagues (Reference Eisenberg, Cumberland and Spinrad1998a, Reference Eisenberg, Spinrad and Cumberlandb; Eisenberg, Reference Eisenberg2020) coined the term emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) to describe the ways that caregivers contribute to children’s emotionality and regulation. ERSBs are thought to be somewhat distinct from other parenting behaviors such as general warmth and/or harshness because they are strategies that may be directly modeled and/or enable children to understand and regulate their own emotions (see Speidel et al., Reference Speidel, Wang, Cummings and Valentino2020). In their heuristic model, the authors proposed that some of the relations between ERSBs and children’s outcomes (e.g. social competence, adjustment) are mediated by children’s arousal and regulation skills and moderated by a variety of factors such as children’s characteristics (e.g. age, sex, temperament) and situational factors (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 A heuristic model of the socialization of emotion

Note. There also may be linear relations and interactions among the four predictors on the left. Moreover, the four predictors can predict child outcomes.

ERSBs are thought to be of at least three types: (1) socializers’ responses to children’s emotions; (2) socializers’ own expression of emotions in the family or toward the child; and (3) socializers’ discussions of emotions.

9.2 Bidirectional Relations

Although most often it is assumed that children’s emotions and emotion regulation are affected by parental socialization practices, it is also recognized that children can evoke certain parenting reactions and that the process of influence between socializers and children’s self-regulation is likely bidirectional. Children who are unregulated or highly negatively reactive undoubtedly can elicit controlling, negative, or ineffective parenting behaviors. Consistent with this line of reasoning, children’s self-regulation has been shown to positively predict parents’ later sensitivity, warmth, support and cognitive assistance (Eisenberg, Vidmar, et al., Reference Eisenberg, Spinrad and Eggum2010; Otterpohl & Wild, Reference Otterpohl and Wild2015; Van Lissa et al., Reference Li, Willems, Stok, Deković, Bartels and Finkenauer2019), that is, behaviors similar to emotion-related socialization behaviors. In a recent meta-analysis, Li et al. (Reference Li, Willems, Stok, Deković, Bartels and Finkenauer2019) found bidirectional relations between parenting and adolescents‘ self-control, with no significant difference between the longitudinal associations from parenting to youths’ self-control compared to the other direction of effects. In a meta-analysis, Xu (Reference Xu2022) showed significant effect sizes for both parent and child effects for longitudinal relations between parenting behaviors and children’s effortful control. In contrast, in some studies, child effects have been tested but were not found (Eisenberg, Spinrad, Eggum, Silva, et al., Reference Eisenberg, Spinrad and Eggum2010). Thus, it is critical for researchers to consider bidirectional and transactional relations between ERSBs and children’s self-regulation.

Researchers also have begun to examine the temporal, moment-to-moment dyadic relations between ERSBs and children’s emotions or emotion-related regulation (Lunkenheimer et al., Reference Lunkenheimer, Hamby, Lobo, Cole and Olson2020). As a case in point, Chan and colleagues (Reference Chan, Feng, Inboden, Hooper and Gerhardt2022) assessed children’s positive and negative emotions during a challenging puzzle task, and mothers’ regulatory strategies were observed. Children’s positive emotion 2 seconds earlier predicted mothers’ lower problem-solving strategies, whereas child negative emotion predicted lower approval but higher comforting behaviors. Further, maternal approval predicted children’s positive emotion 2 seconds later. These findings point to the dynamic nature of children’s emotions and the ways that parents and children may feed off each other at the micro level.

9.3 Moderation

In Eisenberg and colleagues’ heuristic model (Eisenberg et al., Reference Eisenberg, Cumberland and Spinrad1998a, Reference Eisenberg, Spinrad and Cumberlandb; Eisenberg, Reference Eisenberg2020; see Figure 9.1), pathways between ERSBs and children’s emotion/regulation are sometimes moderated by a number of factors. That is, relations of ERSBs might depend on variability in parents’ or children’s emotions, the context (immediate and cultural), and children’s temperament. Next, we briefly consider the ways that culture or race, child characteristics, or more global parenting behaviors might moderate the relations between ERSBs and children’s regulatory skills.

9.4 Promoting Children’s Regulation Skills through Parenting Intervention

Although the research is somewhat limited, there is evidence that interventions can promote children’s ability to regulate their emotions. There are promising school-based interventions that target children’s emotion regulation skills; nonetheless, for the purposes of this chapter, we focus on interventions targeting parenting and parent-child interactions. Recently, Hajal and Paley (Reference Hajal and Paley2020) reviewed the literature on parental intervention programs and noted that they are focused on four areas of emotion socialization: (1) emotion coaching; (2) parent–child attachment; (3) family-based programs that focus on teaching all family members emotional skills, often in the context of family trauma; and (4) programs that are designed to reduce problem behaviors, such as conduct problems, and focus on emotion management.

Parenting interventions that specifically target emotion socialization include those that teach emotion coaching behaviors. The Tuning into Kids program (Havighurst et al., Reference Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, Prior and Kehoe2010, Reference Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, Kehoe, Efron and Prior2013) and the parallel program for parents of young adolescents (Tuning into Teens; Kehoe et al., Reference Kehoe, Havighurst and Harley2014, Reference Kehoe, Havighurst and Harley2020) specifically teach parents how to recognize and manage their children’s emotions and provide strategies for parents to improve their emotion coaching. Results of randomized control trials indicate that these programs improve parental emotion socialization and reduce children’s problem behaviors and emotional negativity. In another emotion-coaching intervention, Katz and colleagues (Reference Katz, Gurtovenko, Maliken, Stettler, Kawamura and Fladeboe2020) developed a parenting intervention for survivors of intimate partner violence. In this 12-week intervention program, mothers were taught skills to improve their own emotion regulation as well as emotion coaching skills. Findings showed that, compared to mothers who were in a waitlist (control) group, mothers in the intervention group showed improvements in emotion coaching, awareness and validation of their children’s emotions, and confidence in their parenting. Also, mothers in the intervention group decreased their use of negative parenting strategies, such as scolding or lecturing, compared to the control group. Children whose mothers were in the intervention group increased their mother-reported emotion regulation and decreased their negativity toward their mothers compared to children of mothers in the waitlist group.

Also at least partially informed by Eisenberg and colleagues’ heuristic model, interventions that focus on discussions of children’s past emotions have been conducted. For example, mothers participating in a reminiscing and emotion training program were trained to increase conversations with their children that make connections between the causes and consequences of emotions and help resolve children’s negative emotions. In a randomized control trial in a sample of maltreating and nonmaltreating mothers, the intervention predicted improved maternal sensitive guidance and positive family expressiveness, which in turn, predicted greater improvements in children’s emotion regulation compared to those in the control condition (Speidel et al., Reference Speidel, Wang, Cummings and Valentino2020).

Other intervention programs have been conducted that incorporate emotion socialization, but these programs often have somewhat broader goals. That is, although each program has an emotion socialization component, they mainly target the parent–child attachment system, family resiliency, and/or specific child symptoms such as child behavioral problems, disruptive behavior disorders, or anxiety and depression. Nonetheless, many of these programs have shown progress in improving both parenting and child outcomes (see England-Mason & Gonzalez, Reference England-Mason and Gonzalez2020; Hajal & Paley, Reference Hajal and Paley2020, for reviews). Interestingly, in a meta-analysis testing different components of parental intervention programs, those programs the included emotional communication and/or consistent responding demonstrated larger intervention effects on parenting behaviors than programs that did not include emotional components (Kaminski et al., Reference Kaminski, Valle, Filene and Boyle2008). In a recent parenting intervention program that included a focus on mindfulness and emotion coaching skills for post-deployed military families, N. Zhang and colleagues (Reference Zhang, Lee, Zhang, Piehler and Gewirtz2020) found that parents in the intervention group showed greater declines in both mothers’ and fathers’ corrective and suppressive responses to children’s negative emotions over 2 years compared to families in the control group. Thus, although there are few longitudinal studies that examine the effectiveness of various intervention programs targeting parental emotion socialization, the existing research is encouraging in regard to the goal of improving children’s self-regulation through promoting change in parenting practices (Speidel et al., Reference Speidel, Wang, Cummings and Valentino2020).

9.5 Future Directions for Research on Parental Socialization of Emotion

Studies focused on the socialization of emotion and emotion-related regulation could benefit from advanced methodological approaches. For example, recently researchers have studied the socialization of emotion in various innovative ways, including using time series data (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Gatzke‐Kopp, Cole and Ram2022), dyadic data (Lunkenheimer et al., Reference Lunkenheimer, Hamby, Lobo, Cole and Olson2020), or neurological measures (Tan et al., Reference Tan, Oppenheimer, Ladouceur, Butterfield and Silk2020). Such data can be used to understand moment-to-moment dynamics of emotional parent–child interactions and can take into account the transactional nature of interactions.

Although research focusing on the role of fathers’ emotion socialization has received increasing attention in recent years (see Eisenberg, Reference Eisenberg2020), there is a need to study the additive and interactive effects of different socializers on children’s emotionality and self-regulation. For example, it is important to understand the additive (cumulative) prediction of children’s emotionality and other aspects of emotion-related functioning from each parent’s emotion-related socialization behaviors. Perhaps each parent’s behaviors uniquely predict children’s emotion-related outcomes. In addition, fathers’ emotion-related socialization behaviors could interact with mothers’ emotion-related socialization behaviors to either amplify, compensate, or undermine the impact of the other parents’ behaviors. As one possibility, one parent’s validation of their child’s emotions could compensate for the other parent’s invalidation or punitive responses to their child’s emotions. Furthermore, other socializers such as older siblings and extended family members (i.e. grandparents) might also be considered in future work.

Finally, research on contexts outside of the family must be considered with regard to the socialization of children’s emotional competence. For example, Valiente and colleagues (Reference Valiente, Swanson, DeLay, Fraser and Parker2020) posited that the school context provides important socialization of emotions. That is, teachers’ own regulation and interactions with students likely play an important role in the socialization of emotion for school-aged children. Further, peers undoubtedly function as important socializers of emotion in the classroom context (and outside of the classroom). Additional research on the roles of multiple sources of socialization on children’s regulation is needed.

In this chapter, we have explored relations between parental emotion-related socialization practices and children’s emotionality and emotion-related regulation. One of our goals was to review the literature on relations with, and prediction of, children’s emotional outcomes from parents’ responses to children’s emotions, parents’ own emotionality, and parents’ discussion of emotions. We also offered additional considerations for future study, particularly with regard to potential moderators. Such work could contribute to the formulation and testing of existing and new intervention and prevention programs that specifically address parental emotion socialization.