Ignoring Children's Emotions: A novel ignoring subscale for the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale

Abstract

Researchers and theorists agree that parents may ignore children's emotions as a form of emotion socialization, yet few parent-report measures assess this emotion socialization strategy. This study describes a conceptual approach to understanding parents' ignoring responses and describes a novel subscale added to the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale, which assesses parents' intentional ignoring of children's negative emotions. Eighty-one parents of 3–6-year-old children reported on their emotion socialization and their children's socioemotional adjustment. Relations between parents' ignoring responses and other emotion socialization strategies and among parents' emotion socialization strategies and children's adjustment are explored. The ignoring subscale is internally consistent and relates positively to unsupportive strategies such as punitive and minimizing responses and to children's emotional lability and anger/aggression. Implications and directions for additional research are discussed.