Parents’ socialization of preschool-aged children's emotion skills: A meta-analysis using an emotion-focused parenting practices framework

Abstract

Children make dramatic gains in their abilities to understand, express, and regulate their feelings before entering kindergarten. Despite decades of research into parents’ socialization of young children's emotion skills, the field lacks a formal synthesis of past studies testing the associations between specific emotion-focused parenting practices and young children's emerging emotion skills. The present meta-analysis addresses this gap. This study relies on a framework that organizes parent emotion socialization into three core emotion-focused parenting practices (modeling, responding, and instructing) and connects these practices to children's emotion skills (knowledge, expression, and regulation). Over 1600 abstracts were screened. Articles meeting inclusion criteria (N = 24) reported that parents’ modeling of, responding to, and instructing about emotions were positively correlated with children's emotion skills, but only sometimes significantly, and effect sizes were small (ranging from r¯=.05 to r¯=.19 and β¯=.05 to β¯=.12) and studies mostly relied on bivariate cross-sectional associations. This review also revealed several ways in which the literature can be strengthened, including through the use of longitudinal and experimental designs, reliance on common measures, and inclusion of diverse representative samples. This study concludes with a discussion of these findings’ implications for future research, especially the need for improved reporting standards and increased attention to understudied aspects of emotion-focused parenting.