Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data.

Abstract

This article introduces the concepts of parental meta-emotion, which refers to parents' emotions about their own and their children's emotions, and meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of thoughts and metaphors, a philosophy, and an approach to one's own emotions and to one's children's emotions. In the context of a longitudinal study beginning when the children were 5 years old and ending when they were 8 years old, a theoretical model and path analytic models are presented that relate parental meta-emotion philosophy to parenting, to child regulatory physiology, to emotion regulation abilities in the child, and to child outcomes in middle childhood. The importance of parenting practices for children's long-term psychological adjustment has been a central tenet in developmental and family psychology. In this article, we introduce a new concept of parenting that we call parental meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of feelings and thoughts about one's own emotions and one's children's emotions. We use the term meta-emotion broadly to encompass both feelings and thoughts about emotion, rather than in the more narrow sense of one's feelings about feelings (e.g., feeling guilty about being angry). The notion we have in mind parallels metacognition, which refers to the executive functions of cognition (Allen & Armour, 1993; Bvinelli, 1993; Flavell, 1979; Fodor, 1992; Olson & Astington, 1993). In an analogous manner, meta-emotion philosophy