Parents' inconsistent emotion socialization and children's socioemotional adjustment

a r t i c l e i n f o Parents socialize children's emotion through active, purposeful strategies and through their own expressivity; yet little research has examined whether parents are inconsistent within or between these socialization domains. The author presents a heuristic model of inconsistency in parents' emotion socialization. Parents (M age = 34.8 years, 85% mothers) of preschool-aged children (M age = 4.5 years, 53% female) reported on their responses to children's emotions, their own expressivity, child emotion regulation and expressivity, child social competence, and child internalizing and externalizing. Parents were largely consistent in their emotion socialization , with one exception being that some highly negatively expressive parents punished children's negative ex-pressivity. This pairing of inconsistent socialization behaviors interacted to explain variance in child emotion regulation and internalizing. The author discusses the implications and limitations of the findings and directions for future research. Parent–child relationships are the first context in which children learn about social interactions and emotions and serve as a rehearsal stage for children's developing socioemotional skills. Parents socialize children's emotional competence by labeling and defining emotions, discussing the significance of emotions and their regulation, and modeling emotion expression and emotion regulation (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998; Morris et al., 2002). Multiple theorists categorize these emotion socialization (ES) behaviors into two domains: 1) active, purposeful responses to and discussions of children's emotions; and 2) relatively passive, unintentional modeling of emotions and emotion-related behaviors (Eisenberg et al.tional expressivity, modeling of emotions) strongly contributes to children's socioemotional competence, as children are likely to learn about emotions by watching how parents handle their own emotions (Denham, 2007). Indeed, parents' general expressiveness, regardless of valence, improves children's understanding of others' emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). However, this relation is likely curvilinear, with positive links between parent expressivity and child emotional competence restricted to the early childhood period (Halberstadt & Eaton, 2002). Conversely, parents' frequent, dysregualted displays of negative emotions likely undermine children's developing socioemotional skills Further, parents' poor emotion regulation and low levels of positive emotion are linked to children's concurrent and subsequent internalizing and externalizing problems Researchers and theorists have largely assumed that parents' ES behaviors should be consistent between socialization domains, though there is good reason to suspect the opposite. In contrast to their active ES, parents' emotional expressions " do not especially reflect [their] beliefs , values, and goals in relation to emotion " (Eisenberg et …