Parents’ Couple Relationship, Parent-Child Relationship and Emotion Regulation among Malaysian Children

Abstract

Studies have found the importance of parent couple relationship and parent child relationship in relation to children’s emotional regulation. Nevertheless, these findings are based on isolated studies which do not really reflect the extent to which each factor relates with each other as well as to their children’s emotional regulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the interactions between parents’ couple relationship satisfaction, parent-child relationship and children’s emotion regulation among children in Malaysia. Couple Satisfaction Index (CSI)-4 was used to measure satisfaction level in couple relationship, PACHIQ-R for parent-child relationship and Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) for children’s emotion regulation. Cluster sampling was used to select the sample and a total of 357 parents responded to the questionnaires. The analyses have found that all variables are significantly and positively correlated with each other. In other words, the findings suggest that parent-child relationship is related to parents’ couple relationship and children’s emotional regulation is related to both of these variables.