Developmental Psychology

© 2020 American Psychological Association 2020, Vol. 56, No. 3, 403– 417
ISSN: 0012-1649 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000864

Parental Emotion and Emotion Regulation: A Critical Target of Study for

Research and Intervention to Promote Child Emotion Socialization
Nastassia J. Hajal and Blair Paley
University of California, Los Angeles

Parents’ behaviors—particularly their emotion socialization behaviors (ESBs)— drive children’s emotion
socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). We propose that a major next step in the effort
to promote healthy emotional development is to improve the field’s understanding of the most proximal
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contributor to parent ESBs: parents’ own experience and regulation of emotions in the context of
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caregiving. As an initial step, this paper integrates Eisenberg and colleagues’ model of emotion
socialization with theoretical and empirical work on parental emotion. We review the literature on the
emotionally evocative nature of parenting, which influences parental ESBs, including parents’ expres-
sions of emotions and their responses to children’s emotions. However, whereas parental emotions
influence behavior, they do not necessarily determine it; parents may regulate their emotions to engage
in optimal ESBs. Thus, parental regulation contributes to emotion socialization not only by modeling
emotion regulation strategies for children, but also by influencing the quality of parents’ ESBs. From a
clinical perspective, parental emotion regulation is of utmost importance due to the degree of parental
involvement in interventions for childhood emotional and behavioral disorders, which are often aimed at
promoting child self-regulation. To illustrate practical applications of Eisenberg’s model, we discuss
evidence-based practices that include enhancement of parent emotion regulation as a primary target, with
the ultimate goal of promoting child emotional development. Ultimately, we aim to spur future
theoretical, empirical, and translational work in this area.

Keywords: emotion socialization, intervention, parent emotion, parent emotion regulation, prevention

Parents and other primary caregivers have a remarkable impact
on every facet of their children’s development. In the past two
decades, the research community has built a large body of empir-
ical evidence supporting Eisenberg and colleagues’ theoretical
model of parental socialization of emotion, which gives primary
significance to the impact of parents’ emotional expressions and
behaviors on their children’s development of emotional compe-
tence and well-being. The model posits that parents’ emotion
socialization behaviors (ESBs), particularly their expression of
emotions and their reactions to children’s emotions, have a direct
impact on children’s emotional arousal and learning about emo-
tions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). The model also describes other
processes influencing emotion socialization, ascribing a particu-
larly important role to parenting style (such as warmth, hostility,
permissiveness, etc.) as both a predictor of ESBs and a moderator
of the relation between ESBs and socialization (Eisenberg, Cum-
berland, et al., 1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998).
There is strong empirical support for the impact of ESBs on a wide
X Nastassia J. Hajal and Blair Paley, Department of Psychiatry and
Biobehavioral Sciences, Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience
and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nastassia
J. Hajal, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Jane and
Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of
California, Los Angeles, 760 Westwood Plaza, Room A8-153, Los Ange-
les, CA 90095. E-mail: nhajal@mednet.ucla.edu
variety of child outcomes, including the ability to modulate emo-
tional states (Morris, Criss, Silk, & Houltberg, 2017), academic
achievement (Moed et al., 2017), and the development of psycho-
pathology (Johnson, Hawes, Eisenberg, Kohlhoff, & Dudeney,
2017). This research has been conducted with a range of samples
with regard to developmental stage, race, ethnicity, immigration
status, region, family composition, and socioeconomic status
(Dunbar, Leerkes, Coard, Supple, & Calkins, 2017; Karkhanis &
Winsler, 2016; Lugo-Candelas, Harvey, & Breaux, 2015).
The present article integrates Eisenberg and colleagues’ model
of emotion socialization with theoretical and empirical work on
parental emotion. The science of human emotion shows that indi-
viduals’ internal emotional experiences and capacity for emotion
regulation (i.e., awareness, modulation, or maintenance of emo-
tional states; Thompson, 1994) are related to their emotional
expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1978) and their behaviors (Frijda,
1988); thus, it is reasonable to posit that parents’ emotional expe-
riences and regulation in caregiving situations have an impact on
their ESBs. Indeed, the Eisenberg model acknowledges parents’
own emotions as influential in child emotion socialization (Eisen-
berg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cum-
berland, 1998; see Figure 1). Yet, relatively few studies have
explicitly examined parents’ internal experiences in relation to their
ESBs (Morelen, Shaffer, & Suveg, 2016). We propose that a major
next step in the effort to promote healthy emotional development
is to improve the field’s understanding of how parents’ own
experiences and regulation of emotion are related to their chil-
dren’s emotion socialization (see Figure 1). This study begins with

403
 404 HAJAL AND PALEY

Parental Emotion &

Emotion Regulation

Child Characteristics
e.g., Age,
Sex, Temperament Child Outcomes
Emotion-related Parenting e.g., Experience of emotion,
Practices Expression of emotion, Social Behavior
e.g., Reaction to child’s Child’s Regulation in the specific context, & Social
emotion, arousal Acquisition of regulation capacitates, Competence
Parent Characteristics
Discussion of emotion, Understanding of emotion and regulation,
e.g., Sex,
Emotional expressiveness, Affective stance toward emotions and oneself
Personality,
Selection/modification of as an expressor of emotion,
General parenting style,
situations Attempts at thought suppression,
Emotion-related beliefs and values,
Parental goals (e.g., empathic, Schemas about self, relationships, and the
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personal, socialization goals) world (including working models of relationship)

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Cultural Factors Moderators

e.g., Emotion-related beliefs, norms e.g., Parenting style,
and values, Quality of parent-child relationship,
Gender stereotypes Type and intensity of child’s emotions,
Type and intensity of parents’ emotion,
Appropriateness of parents’ emotion and behavior in the context,
Context
Child’s temperament/personality,
e.g., Degree of emotion in context,
Child’s sex and developmental level
Potential for harm to someone,
Variability and consistency of parental behavior,
History of emotion-related
Clarity of parental communication,
interactions in family, including
Fit of parental behavior with child’s developmental level,
marital discord
Whether parental behavior is directed at child,
Whether parental behavior is proactive or reactive

Figure 1. The role of parental emotion and emotion regulation (ER) within Eisenberg, Spinrad, et al.’s (1998)
model of the socialization of emotion. Bolded, italicized text highlights where parental emotion and ER were
already included in Eisenberg et al.’s model. Parental emotion/ER is also added as its own construct (shaded box
at top of figure). Dashed arrows indicate where parental emotion and ER may influence elements of the original
model, and where elements of the original model may influence parental emotion and ER. See the online article
for the color version of this figure.

a review of research examining the multitude of emotions evoked
by parent– child interactions, which have implications for ESBs. It
then discusses the research suggesting that parenting is “affec-
tively organized” (Dix, 1991), which provides a useful framework
for conceptualizing linkages between parents’ own emotional ex-
periences and their responses to children’s emotions. It then re-
views prevention and intervention programs for children and fam-
ilies that promote parent emotion regulation. We conclude with a
discussion of future directions for both basic and intervention
research.
Parenting Is Emotionally Evocative: Implications for
Parents’ ESBs
Parent– child interactions and other parenting-related tasks (e.g.,
talking about the child, thinking about the child, preparing activ-
ities for the child when he or she is not present) elicit a broad range
of emotions in both mothers and fathers. This includes positive
emotions such as joy, love, contentment, pride, and relief, as well
as negative emotions such as anger, frustration, disappointment,
worry, fear, and guilt (e.g., Bradley, Hurwitz, Harvey, Hodgson, &
Perugini, 2013). Furthermore, parental emotions may be child-
oriented (i.e., experienced on behalf of the child, such as being
angry at oneself for not attending to the child’s needs) or they may
be self/parent-oriented (e.g., on behalf of the parent, such as being
angry at the child for fussing; Dix, Gershoff, Meunier, & Miller,
2004; Leerkes, Su, Calkins, Supple, & O’Brien, 2016).
If parents express even a fraction of the emotions that they
experience while parenting, their children will have abundant
opportunities to observe a range of expressions that may vary in
valence, intensity, and frequency. This is important because chil-
dren learn about emotions partly by simply observing their par-
ents’ emotions (Eisenberg, Cumberland, et al., 1998; Morris, Silk,
Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). Social referencing— or,
children’s looking to parents to interpret ambiguous situations or
environmental cues—is present as early as infancy and is a critical
pathway by which children imbue their worlds with affective
significance (Saarni, Campos, Camras, & Witherington, 2007).
Children’s first exposure to the diversity of emotional experiences
comes from their caregivers; for example, children of anxious
parents show increased fearfulness and avoidance, whereas chil-
dren of depressed parents show increased negative affectivity and
decreased positive affectivity (Aktar & Bögels, 2017). Addition-
ally, children may emulate their parents’ emotion regulation and/or
dysregulation behaviors (Bariola, Hughes, & Gullone, 2012). Al-
though most of the research linking parent and child emotionality
has been conducted with biologically related families (presenting
the possibility that associations are genetically mediated), replica-
tion of findings using behavior genetic designs (see Natsuaki et al.,
2014) provide support for the contribution of social learning.
 PARENTAL EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION
Because parents’ emotion expressions are related to their subjec-
tive experiences of emotion and to their emotion regulation, we
argue that a nuanced understanding of the emotionally evocative
nature of parenting is critical to research and practice on child
emotion socialization. This includes an understanding of the range
of emotional experiences evoked in parenting, as well as how
parents’ emotions vary as a function of the type and intensity of
children’s ongoing emotions and behaviors, situational variables,
broad contextual factors, goals, and developmental level.
Emotions Experienced in Parenting
Studies employing observational coding systems that assess
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emotion cues in facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone
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indicate that parents’ expressions (positive and negative) are often
contingent on children’s emotion and behavior (Cole, Teti, &
Zahn-Waxler, 2003; Dix, Moed, & Anderson, 2014). Observa-
tional assessment of parental emotion is useful in studying emotion
socialization because it documents the emotions that children
observe, which contribute to their emotion socialization. However,
observational methods alone cannot capture parents’ regulation of
emotion, which is a common occurrence in parenting (Hajal, Teti,
Cole, & Ram, 2019; Rutherford, Wallace, Laurent, & Mayes,
2015) and has an impact on socialization of emotion via parents’
emotional expression (or lack thereof) and behaviors (Havighurst
& Kehoe, 2017). Self-report methods are useful because they
capture a parent’s subjective emotion experience whether or not
the parent modulates the outward expression of that emotion.
Studies that employed both observational and self-report measures
of parental emotion showed that these two indicators were gener-
ally not associated, suggesting that parents may regulate the out-
ward expression of their felt emotions, at least during observed
parent– child interaction tasks (Cole, Teti, & Zahn-Waxler, 2003).
Importantly, parents’ behavior (including ESBs) may be affected
by their internal emotional experiences even if facial and vocal
cues are modulated.
Research employing self-report methods indicates that parenting
evokes a variety of emotions, some of which are regulated or
otherwise unobservable, but all of which may impact parenting
behavior. Some studies use questionnaire measures that have par-
ents report on their general emotions or emotion regulation within
the parenting role (Bradley et al., 2013; Lorber, 2012; Martini,
Root, & Jenkins, 2004). For example, a study using the Parental
Feelings Inventory, which asks parents to rate the degree to which
they felt 31 specific emotions in their role as a parent over the past
week, indicated that general feelings of happiness, anger, and
anxiety/sadness are associated with self-reported parenting behav-
iors (Bradley et al., 2013). Parent self-report of emotions has also
been conducted via experience sampling method, in which indi-
viduals are measured remotely and repeatedly as they go about
daily life. This method has been used to capture the variability in
parental emotion that is lost when individuals are asked to aggre-
gate their experiences over the course of days or weeks (as in many
questionnaires). An experience sampling method study that fol-
lowed mothers of 14- to 24-month-olds over the course of six days
showed that there was considerable within-person variability for
self-reports of maternal happiness, confidence, sadness, anger, and
worry during challenging parenting situations (Hajal et al., 2019).
405
Other studies ask parents to report on their emotions in response
to standardized parent– child interaction tasks. One approach is to
video record an interaction, immediately followed by a viewing of
the video while the parent reports on how they felt during the
interaction (Lorber, 2007). These studies have implicated a variety
of parental emotions experienced during lab-based tasks (e.g.,
anger, guilt, relief), which are associated with specific types of
parenting behaviors (e.g., overreactivity, sensitivity; Dix et al.,
2004; Lorber & Slep, 2005).
Psychophysiological methods have also informed the study of
parental emotions by capturing immediate emotion-related re-
sponses, even before they reach parents’ awareness. EEG and
functional MRI have shown that brain circuits involved in emo-
tional and motivational processing (e.g., thalamus, limbic system
including amygdala, basal ganglia, etc.) are activated when moth-
ers and fathers are exposed to auditory or visual stimuli of infants
(Killeen & Teti, 2012; Paul et al., 2019; Swain et al., 2014). Work
using simultaneous measurement of electrodermal and respiratory
activity showed that maternal physiological arousal in response to
infant frustration at 6 and 14 months was associated with infant
attachment disorganization at 14 months and behavioral problems
at 27 months, unless maternal arousal co-occurred with vagal
suppression, which is indicative of regulation (Leerkes, Su,
Calkins, O’Brien, & Supple, 2017). Interestingly, these relations
held even when controlling for sensitive parenting behavior, sug-
gesting that children’s observation of parents’ dysregulated nega-
tive arousal may have accounted for these associations. Of course,
there are limitations to physiological methods, including that they
cannot differentiate between specific types of emotions or emotion
regulation strategies. Some studies have addressed this limitation
by showing that physiological patterns are, in turn, associated with
mothers’ self-report of joy, irritability, sadness, worry, and guilt
(Killeen & Teti, 2012) and observed facial expressions of joy,
sadness, and tension (Hajal, Cole, & Teti, 2017) during the same
task.
Variation in Parents’ Emotional Responses
To truly inform the study of emotion socialization, we must
know not only which emotions parents experience, but more
specifically how parents’ emotional experiences, regulation, and
behavior vary as a function of diverse parent, child, and contextual
factors. There are several exemplary studies that push forward
research in this area. Dix and colleagues (Dix et al., 2014) used
fine-grained time-series analyses of observed dyadic data to cap-
ture real-time socialization dynamics in families with a depressed
parent, a population at high risk for child socioemotional malad-
justment. Depressed mothers tended to be disengaged during a
conflict discussion with their child, but only until the child’s
behavior became highly aversive, at which point mothers dis-
played high degrees of distress (Dix et al., 2014). In addition to
documenting types of emotional expressions that children may
observe in their parents, the process-oriented, observational nature
of this study clarified previous findings that depressed parents
show both disengaged and overreactive parenting behaviors
(Lovejoy, Graczyk, O’Hare, & Neuman, 2000) by documenting
the specific conditions under which each occurs.
Another study examined the impact of child developmental
level on maternal emotions. Cole and colleagues used an innova-
 406 HAJAL AND PALEY
tive design that allowed mothers to report on their emotions
in-the-moment of managing multiple demands when children were
18, 24, 36, and 48 months old (Cole, Ledonne, & Tan, 2013).
Mothers were asked to complete questionnaires—including one
about their ongoing positive and negative emotions—while also
managing their children, who had been instructed to wait to open
an attractively wrapped gift. Mothers’ self-reported emotions dur-
ing the task were associated with children’s observed emotions,
behaviors, and regulatory efforts during the same task, although
specific relations changed over the course of early childhood.
Children’s expressed anger at all ages predicted mothers’ concur-
rent negative emotions, but disruptive child behavior only pre-
dicted maternal negative emotion when children were 48 months
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old. This suggests that the emotionally evocative nature of certain
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parenting challenges changes over the course of development, with
disruptive behavior eliciting a higher degree of maternal negative
emotion once children are old enough for parents to expect them to
self-regulate in a public setting (Cole et al., 2013).
In sum, research using multiple methods shows that parents
experience and regulate a variety of emotions over the course of
parenting that may have an impact on their children’s emotion
socialization via children’s observation and impact on parenting.
Future research should seek to further elucidate the conditions
under which specific parental emotions are evoked and how they
are regulated.
Parenting Is Affectively Organized: Implications for
Parenting Behaviors, Including ESBs
The emotionally evocative nature of parenting has implications
for emotion socialization not only due to observation of parental
emotions, but also to the impact of parents’ emotions on their
parenting behavior. In line with functional emotion theory—which
states that emotions influence behaviors (Frijda, 1988)—parental
emotion researchers posit that parenting behaviors are influenced
by the emotions that arise during parenting (Dix, 1991; Teti &
Cole, 2011); in other words, parenting is affectively organized.
This model is supported by a robust body of empirical work,
including several meta-analyses (Lovejoy et al., 2000; Prinzie,
Stams, Deković, Reijntjes, & Belsky, 2009; Rueger, Katz, Risser,
& Lovejoy, 2011). In applying this framework to the study of child
emotion socialization, it is worth noting that most research to date
has examined the impact of parental emotion on general styles of
parenting behavior (e.g., sensitivity, hostility) as opposed to par-
ents’ active, purposeful ESBs, such as emotion coaching, expres-
sive encouragement, and punitive or minimizing responses to
children’s emotion expressions. As noted by Eisenberg and col-
leagues, these two constructs (general parenting behaviors and
ESBs) are somewhat confounded in that emotion-related behaviors
are often one component of broader parenting dimensions (Eisen-
berg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998, Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cum-
berland, 1998). For example, sensitive parenting involves expres-
sions of positive emotion and contingent responding to children’s
affect (both of which are ESBs), in addition to scaffolding and
contingent responding to children’s behaviors (which would not
necessarily be considered ESBs). General styles of parenting be-
havior are posited to influence the relations between ESBs and
children’s emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spin-
rad, 1998, Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998). Further-
more, parenting style is posited to have a direct effect on children’s
development of emotion regulation (Morris et al., 2007, 2017).
Thus, we include general styles of parenting behavior in our
review.
Parent Emotions and General Styles of Parenting
Behavior
A robust body of literature indicates that parenting behavior is
associated with parents’ emotion-related characteristics, such as
psychopathology (Lovejoy et al., 2000) and temperamental indices
of affectivity (Prinzie et al., 2009). An emerging literature indi-
cates that parents’ specific emotional states are also related to
parenting behaviors (Rueger et al., 2011; although parents may
regulate their emotional experiences, impacting their parenting
behavior). Furthermore, different emotions are associated with
different types of parenting behavior. Parental positive affect is
associated with sensitive, supportive parenting (Rueger et al.,
2011), anger is associated with parenting that is characterized as
harsh, hostile, or reactive (Ateah & Durrant, 2005; Leung & Slep,
2006), anxiety and worry with controlling overprotectiveness and
restrictiveness (Dix et al., 2004; Kaitz & Maytal, 2005), and
sadness with behavior that is noncontrolling and detached from
children’s goals and needs (Bradley et al., 2013; Dix et al., 2004).
Empathy is especially relevant to parenting because parents’ goals
are related not only to their own well-being, but also to the
well-being of their children (Dix et al., 2004; Hastings & Grusec,
1998). Multimethod research suggests that parental empathic pro-
cessing in response to children’s distress is associated with sensi-
tive, responsive caregiving (Hastings & Grusec, 1998; Killeen &
Teti, 2012; Leerkes et al., 2016; Swain et al., 2012). Thus, con-
sidering discrete parental emotions is relevant to emotion social-
ization research not only because of children’s observation of
distinct types of emotion, but also because they may lead to
different types of parenting behaviors that further socialize emo-
tions.
As noted above, it is critical to keep in mind that parents
regulate their emotions over the course of parenting (Hajal et al.,
2019; Rutherford et al., 2015). In other words, although parental
emotions influence behavior, they do not necessarily determine it;
parents may regulate their emotions— either automatically or in-
tentionally—to modulate their behavioral responses to children.
For example, parental anger was associated with harsh discipline
only for mothers who were higher in impulsivity (and thus may
have had more difficulty regulating; Rhoades, Grice, & Del Vec-
chio, 2017). A comprehensive review of the literature showed that
higher levels of emotional and cognitive control were associated
with higher levels of positive parenting (i.e., warmth, sensitivity,
involvement, consistency) and lower levels of harsh, punitive, and
inconsistent parenting (Crandall, Deater-Deckard, & Riley, 2015).
Thus, parental regulation also contributes to emotion socialization
by influencing the quality of parental behavior.
Parent Emotions and ESBs
According to an affective organization of parenting framework
(Dix, 1991), parents’ own experiences of emotion in response to
their children’s emotions are the most proximal predictors of their
active ESBs, or, their behavioral reactions to children’s emotions
 PARENTAL EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION
(e.g., minimizing, expressive encouragement, emotion coaching,
etc.) This idea is present in the earliest work on assessment tools
to measure parental socialization of emotion (Eisenberg, Fabes,
Schaller, Carlo, & Miller, 1991), including a widely used and
validated parent-, child-, and teacher-report questionnaire measure
of ESBs, the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale
(Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002), which has
also been adapted into an observational coding system (Murphy,
Boyd-Soisson, Jacobvitz, & Hazen, 2017). These measures include
a construct reflecting parents’ internal experiences of distress in
response to their children’s emotions. It is differentiated from
child-oriented empathic or sympathetic feelings, referring instead
to parents’ personal feelings of distress such as self-oriented anx-
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iety, discomfort, and so forth. Validation of the parent-report
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CCNES indicated that the parental distress subscale was moder-
ately associated with subscales reflecting unsupportive responses
to children’s emotions, but not so highly related as to suggest that
the constructs overlap (Fabes et al., 2002). The one study that
explicitly examined the contribution of parental distress to active
ESBs using the CCNES showed that the relation between unsupport-
ive responses to children’s negative emotions (parent-reported) and
children’s socioemotional adjustment (teacher-reported) was moder-
ated by parental distress. Specifically, the relation was significantly
stronger when parental distress was high (Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff,
& Martin, 2001), suggesting that unsupportive responses to children’s
negative emotions pose less risk if parents are not dysregulated
themselves. Although these findings suggest that parents’ distress in
response to their children’s negative emotions has an impact on their
ESBs, most studies using these measures collapse across subscales.
Although work on parents’ specific emotions and their ESBs is
limited, there are a number of studies examining parent emotion
regulation and ESBs. An important differentiation in this research,
however, is work that examines parents’ general emotion regula-
tion, versus those that examine parents’ emotion regulation within
the parenting context. Studies examining general emotion regula-
tion have used parent mental health symptoms as a proxy for
parent emotion dysregulation (see review by Havighurst & Kehoe,
2017) or parent-report measures of emotion regulation strategies
that are not tied to the parenting role (e.g., Yan, Han, & Li, 2016).
Studies linking parents’ general emotion regulation to their ESBs
is an important step that provides foundational support for the
notion that parent emotion regulation is critical for children’s
healthy emotion socialization; however, research on parenting-
specific emotion regulation is necessary given emerging evidence
for unique aspects of emotion regulation within the parenting
context (e.g., neurobiology supporting emotion regulation changes
at the onset of parenthood; Rutherford et al., 2015). Some exem-
plary studies in this area have used combinations of maternal
self-report, physiology, and observation. Gottman, Katz, and Hooven
(1996) used a semistructured interview to measure parents’ me-
taemotion philosophy (i.e., thoughts and feelings about their own
and their children’s emotions). Parental reports of emotional
awareness was associated with their reports of emotion coaching,
which was in turn related to their observed parenting style and a
variety of child outcomes (Gottman et al., 1996). Morelen et al.
(2016) showed that higher levels of observed maternal dysregula-
tion during parent– child interaction was associated with higher
levels of self-reported unsupportive ESBs (but not supportive
ESBs; Morelen et al., 2016). Finally, Kerns and colleagues (Kerns,
407
Pincus, McLaughlin, & Comer, 2017) used an experimental design
to examine whether maternal emotion dysregulation was linked to
accommodation of children’s anxious avoidance. Accommodation
is known to be a maintaining factor for child anxiety symptoms
and thus is considered a maladaptive response to children’s anxi-
ety. Mothers listened to audio of a child pleading with their parent
to avoid an anxiety-provoking situation, after which they reported
on their positive and negative emotions and use of emotion regu-
lation strategies during the task. Less adaptive maternal emotion
regulation during the task was associated with accommodation of
child anxiety in daily life, which in turn was associated with higher
levels of child anxiety symptoms. These studies add measurably to
the literatures on parental emotion and child emotion socialization,
because they use multiple methods to show a link between
parenting-specific emotion regulation and active ESBs in response
to children’s emotions.
Taken together, these findings indicate that parent emotions and
emotion regulation are an inherent part of emotion socialization.
Although there is still work to be done to fully understand the
processes by which parent emotion affects emotion socialization,
and what we can do to improve it, some treatment developers have
already begun to incorporate parental emotion regulation into
prevention and intervention programs.
Interventions Targeting Parent Emotion Regulation
Given the implication of ESBs on children’s long-term adjust-
ment (e.g., Johnson et al., 2017) it is not surprising that a number
of child and family interventions target parents’ ability to engage
in healthy emotion socialization strategies. Such interventions
often entail teaching parents to support their children’s develop-
ment of emotion vocabulary and coping strategies, as well as how
to respond to their children’s emotional distress supportively and
empathically rather than further escalating their children’s dys-
regulation (e.g., Porzig-Drummond, Stevenson, & Stevenson,
2014). Despite the positive outcomes demonstrated by such inter-
ventions, there may be parents who are not able to take advantage
of the potential benefits they offer. The efficacy of such interven-
tions might be attenuated when parents are significantly compro-
mised in their ability to regulate their own emotions, let alone their
children’s (Barros, Goes, & Pereira, 2015; Maliken & Katz, 2013).
Parents with limited capacity to manage their own emotions may
be reluctant to enroll in treatment in the first place, may have more
difficulty deploying newly learned coregulation skills when their
children are highly distressed, may be less likely to practice skills
outside the clinical setting, and/or may be at greater risk for
withdrawing from the intervention (Havighurst & Kehoe, 2017;
Maliken & Katz, 2013). Indeed, a recent study found that better
parental emotion regulation at baseline predicted treatment re-
sponse to a behavioral parent training intervention for young
children with disruptive behavior disorders (Zachary, Jones, Mc-
Kee, Baucom, & Forehand, 2019). Thus, increased attention is
warranted to interventions that include a focus not only on enhanc-
ing parents’ abilities to support their children’s navigation of
emotional experiences, but on helping them navigate their own as
well.
Here, we provide a narrative review of a small but growing number
of approaches that directly target parental emotion regulation as an
important component of intervention to promote children’s develop-
 408 HAJAL AND PALEY
ment of self-regulation. Although only one intervention is explicitly
based on Eisenberg’s theory of emotion socialization, other ap-
proaches representing a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., at-
tachment, family systems, cognitive– behavioral) and treatment tar-
gets (e.g., individual child, parent– child relationship, family system)
share a recognition that parents who can regulate their own emotions
will be better prepared to help their children develop their emotional
competencies. We included interventions targeting parents, children,
and/or families, as long as the intervention included at least one
session addressing adult emotional experiences or regulation strate-
gies within their role as a parent.
Intervention Based on Emotion Socialization Theory
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Tuning in to Kids (TIK; Havighurst & Kehoe, 2017; Havighurst
et al., 2013) is a six-session group intervention that focuses on
enhancing emotion socialization in parents of preschool-aged chil-
dren. Parents of young children are taught emotion coaching skills,
including increasing their awareness of their child’s emotions,
communicating their understanding of their child’s emotional
states, and helping their child learn to tolerate and recover from
periods of emotional distress. Importantly, TIK also emphasizes
enhancing parents’ own emotion regulation skills as a key com-
ponent of building their capacity to respond supportively to their
child’s emotional dysregulation, with an emphasis on anger regu-
lation. TIK teaches parents to become more aware of their own
emotion states, encourages them to explore how their beliefs and
reactions to emotions were shaped by experiences in their family
of origin, and teaches them emotional self-care skills that can be
used in a preventive fashion and emotion regulation skills they can
use to modulate their own emotions during moments when their
child is emotionally dysregulated (Havighurst & Kehoe, 2017).
The efficacy of TIK has been demonstrated in a number of studies.
In both community (Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, Prior, & Kehoe,
2010) and clinical (Havighurst et al., 2013) samples of parents of
preschoolers, intervention group families showed greater improve-
ments than waitlist control group families in a number of domains,
including: observer-rated child emotion knowledge, parent use of
emotion labels, and parent– child exploration of emotions; parent- and
teacher-reported problem behaviors over time; and parent-reported
emotion coaching, empathy, and dismissiveness. A number of adap-
tations of TIK have also shown promising results, including versions
developed for younger and older children. A randomized trial of
Tuning in to Teens in a community sample (Havighurst, Kehoe, &
Harley, 2015) indicated improvements in parents’ self-reported im-
pulse control and dismissing of adolescent sadness, anxiety, and
anger; adolescent-reports of their externalizing behavior and their
parents’ dismissing responses to anger and anxiety; and parent- and
adolescent-reported family conflict. A pilot study of Tuning in to
Toddlers (no control group) yielded postintervention improvements in
observed parent emotion labeling and exploration, parent-report emo-
tion coaching beliefs, and parent-reported child externalizing behavior
(Lauw, Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, & Northam, 2014).
Such studies indicate that the TIK program and its various
adaptations yield consistent improvements in both parent ESBs
and children’s dysregulation. This may be partly because of its
focus on parental anger regulation. As noted, anger has been linked
to parenting described as harsh, hostile, or reactive (Ateah &
Durrant, 2005; Leung & Slep, 2006). When faced with an emo-
tionally dysregulated child, parental anger may arise for a number
of reasons, including (but not limited to) the parent’s perception
that the child’s emotional distress is unreasonable or dispropor-
tional in that particular situation, the child is purposefully misbe-
having, the child’s distress has exposed the parent’s sense of
inadequacy in modulating their own emotions, and/or the parent
feels ill-equipped to support the child, particularly if the child is
not initially responsive to the parent’s efforts to help. Given that
parental anger may decrease parents’ motivation and/or ability to
respond supportively and empathically to a distressed child, it
seems an especially appropriate target for intervention. Exploring
beliefs arising from the family of origin may also help parents
modulate their own anger by addressing misguided notions about
what kinds of emotional reactions are developmentally appropriate
in children.
The positive findings of TIK may also be attributable to the fact
that the goal of enhancing parent emotion regulation is fully
integrated into the intervention and the specific foci of sessions are
thoughtfully sequenced so that parents have opportunities to build
their own emotion regulation skills as they work up to dealing with
their child’s more difficult emotions, such as anger (Havighurst et
al., 2013). Importantly, the focus on parent emotion regulation is
not added on to the intervention when a standard approach has not
proven effective (Maliken & Katz, 2013), but included as a treat-
ment priority from the beginning. Devoting significant attention to
parent self-regulation at the initiation of treatment may be espe-
cially important in interventions that explicitly teach parents emo-
tion coaching skills when parents have histories that lower their
threshold for dysregulation (e.g., their own trauma or mental health
problems). Teaching parents to become more aware of their child’s
emotions and to engage (rather than avoid) their child when they
are distressed without adequately preparing parents to manage
their own negative arousal may be highly disorganizing for emo-
tionally vulnerable parents, and may render such approaches not
only ineffective, but potentially countertherapeutic.
Attachment-Based Interventions
As noted by Eisenberg and colleagues, parent–infant attachment
has important implications for children’s emotion socialization for
a number of reasons, including its association to style of parenting
behavior (Eisenberg, Spinrad, et al., 1998). Given that the attach-
ment system is activated by emotion (e.g., fear) and that a primary
way in which the attachment relationship develops is through
parents’ responses to their infants’ emotional cues, ESBs are also
intertwined with attachment relationships. A number of parenting
interventions have been designed to cultivate more secure parent–
child attachment relationships in part by improving parents’ ability
to read and respond sensitively and supportively to their children’s
emotional needs. Because parental emotions are an integral com-
ponent to bonding and sensitive parenting (Rueger et al., 2011),
many of these interventions attend to parents’ capacity for emotion
regulation. Reviewed here are five of these programs: Minding the
Baby, Reflective Parenting Program, Circle of Security, Attach-
ment and Biobehavioral Catchup, and Promoting First Relation-
ships.
Minding the Baby (MTB; Slade et al., 2005) is a relationship-
based home visiting program developed for at-risk, traumatized
mothers to increase their reflective capacities—that is, their ability
 PARENTAL EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION
to consider and attempt to understand both their own and their
infant’s internal states. A key premise of this intervention is that
“parents who have been traumatized find their children’s needs
and fears overwhelming and profoundly evocative, and as a result
often find it difficult to read the most basic cues without distortion
or misattribution” (Slade et al., 2005, pp. 76 –77). Recognition of
how emotionally disorganizing an infant’s distress can be for
parents, especially those who carry their own vulnerabilities to
emotional dysregulation, highlights a concurrent focus of treat-
ment in MTB. Through therapeutic relationships with a nurse and
a social worker, the parent learns to better understand and regulate
their own distress while also learning the skills to respond more
sensitively to their infant’s emotional needs. A randomized con-
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trolled trial of MTB showed greater improvements for intervention
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than control group families in terms of maternal reflective func-
tioning and infant attachment status (Slade et al., 2019).
The Reflective Parenting Program (RPP; Grienenberger, Den-
ham, & Reynolds, 2015) similarly focuses on enhancing parental
reflective functioning so that parents are better attuned to their
children’s internal worlds, including how their children’s thoughts,
feelings, desires, and intentions impact their behavior and interac-
tions with others. The parent’s ability to distinguish their child’s
emotions from their own, as well as reflect back the child’s
affective experiences in a way that does not further dysregulate the
child, is foundational to the child’s development of emotion reg-
ulation (Rutherford et al., 2015). RPP teaches parents’ mindfulness
practices to increase awareness of their own thoughts, feelings, and
physiological sensations so they are better able to manage intense
or distressing emotions (their own and their children’s). RPP
introduces parents to the metaphor of the window of reflection and
the notion that when parents are highly dysregulated, the window
narrows. When the window narrows, a parent is less likely to
consider how their child’s internal experiences are driving their
behaviors, and consequently may select from a more constricted
and less constructive range of responses to their child’s distress.
Increasing parents’ understanding of how their own emotional
arousal impacts their ability to reflect on their child’s internal
world may allow them to slow down and respond to their child’s
dysregulation in a more supportive fashion. A pilot study of RPP
found significant decreases in parent depressive symptoms and
parenting stress (Grienenberger et al., 2015). RPP is also currently
undergoing a randomized controlled trial with Head Start families
to evaluate its impact on children’s self-regulation.
Circle of Security (COS; Powell, Cooper, Hoffman, & Marvin,
2013) is a group intervention that promotes the development of
healthy parent– child relationships as a conduit to supporting the
child’s needs for exploration and emotion regulation. A component
of COS entails helping parents connect their emotional responses
to their children’s distress to their own childhood experiences with
caregivers that may cause them to experience their children’s
emotional needs as threatening. Parents learn to distinguish be-
tween their own attachment experiences and their children’s cur-
rent attachment needs and to utilize tools to calm themselves and
respond to their child in a more regulated fashion. Recent studies
of COS have yielded significant decreases in unsupportive re-
sponses to children’s emotional distress among intervention moth-
ers compared with those in the control group (Cassidy et al., 2017),
and significant improvements in parents’ own emotional function-
ing (Huber, McMahon, & Sweller, 2015).
409
Threaded throughout Minding the Baby, the Reflective Parenting
Program, and Circle of Security is the recognition that when parents
are faced with their children’s emotional needs—sometimes in the
form of intense emotional distress—their own histories of how
their emotions have been responded to may impact their ability to
respond supportively in the present. For parents who experienced
less than optimal caregiving in their own childhoods, the emotional
dysregulation of their children may arouse long-standing vulner-
abilities and may in part account for why parenting may be more
emotionally evocative for some parents than others. All of these
interventions appear to recognize that when faced with their chil-
dren’s negative emotions, parents’ may conflate their own dys-
regulation with their child’s. As parents become more able to
distinguish between the two, they may also become more adept at
regulating themselves when their child is distressed and thus
responding sensitively to their child’s emotional needs. The im-
portance of helping parents to modulate their own affect and to
respond to their child reflectively rather than reflexively is central
to these attachment-based interventions. Moreover, this focus is
supported by research linking parents’ emotional expressivity to
children’s emotion socialization (Aktar & Bögels, 2017), including
findings that child emulate their parents’ emotional regulation
strategies or dysregulated behaviors (Bariola et al., 2012). Slade
has noted that “parenting is a fraught and complex enterprise, and
without developed capacities for reflective functioning, parents are
vastly more prone to impulsivity, disorganization, and dysregula-
tion in relation to their child” (Slade et al., 2005, p. 76) and
traumatized parents may be particularly prone to such processes.
Increasing parents’ capacity for reflective function may allow
them to slow down and rather than expressing the first emotion(s)
they experience, provide a more digested or “metabolized” emo-
tional response that takes into account what the child needs in that
moment. Moreover, by building parents’ competence and confi-
dence in effectively managing both their own and their child’s
distress, negative emotions may be experienced as providing use-
ful rather than threatening information.
The need to modulate one’s own emotional responses in the face
of child distress may be especially important for parents or care-
givers of highly vulnerable children, such as those involved with
the foster care system. Dozier and colleagues have noted that “as
the result of inadequate care and/or the experience of relationship
disruption . . . children in foster and adoptive care often behave in
ways that fail to elicit caregiving. . . . That is, when a child behaves
as if he or she does not need the caregiver, the caregiver usually
does not respond with nurturance” (Dozier, Higley, Albus, &
Nutter, 2002, p. 545). Prior research suggests that when foster
children behave in ways that suggest they do not need support,
caregivers respond as if in fact they are not needed, and when
foster children actively resist efforts to support them, caregivers
may react angrily (Stovall & Dozier, 2000). Such findings high-
light the challenge for caregivers in reading the emotional cues of
children who carry histories of having their emotional needs left
unmet. Two interventions for this population, Attachment Biobe-
havioral Catch-Up (ABC; Dozier et al., 2009) and Promoting First
Relationships (PFR; Spieker, Oxford, Kelly, Nelson, & Fleming,
2012), explicitly focus on the caregiver’s experience of attempting
to read and respond to the child’s emotional cues which may often
be ambiguous or outright rejecting (Dozier et al., 2002). Children’s
rejections are reframed within the context of the child’s history of
 410 HAJAL AND PALEY
disrupted attachment relationships so that caregivers are able to
modulate their own emotions in the face of such rejection and
respond empathically to the children’s distress even when the child
seems unreceptive to the caregivers’ efforts to be nurturing. While
both ABC and PFR focus on enhancing caregivers’ skills in
responding to children’s emotional dysregulation, there is also an
explicit focus on helping caregivers become more aware of and
able to modulate their own emotional reactions when a child is
either giving unclear signals or actively rejecting the caregivers’
bids to provide emotional support. There is a clear recognition that
such communications from the child may elicit feelings of rejec-
tion or incompetence in the caregiver. Helping caregivers learn to
first recognize their own emotional reactions and then to reframe
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the child’s communication as actually adaptive in light of their
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histories may help caregivers respond in a more emotionally
modulated fashion. A number of studies provide support for the
efficacy of these intervention models. Recent studies of the ABC
program have shown improvements in children’s attachment se-
curity (Bernard et al., 2012), emotion expression (Lind, Bernard,
Ross, & Dozier, 2014), and in caregivers’ sensitive and emotion-
ally supportive parenting behaviors (Berlin, Shanahan, & Apple-
yard Carmody, 2014). Similarly, randomized controlled trials of
PFR have demonstrated improvements in caregivers’ understand-
ing of children’s emotional needs (Oxford, Spieker, Lohr, & Flem-
ing, 2016; Spieker et al., 2012).
Interventions Targeting the Family System
Guided by a systems perspective, Families Overcoming Under
Stress (FOCUS; Lester et al., 2016) is a family resiliency training
program that was originally developed for military-connected fam-
ilies, but has since been adapted for families dealing with a range
of stressors, including foster families and families affected by
medical trauma. Recognizing that the emotional arousal and dys-
regulation of one family member can reverberate throughout the
entire family system, FOCUS emphasizes teaching all family
members emotion regulation, communication, and problem-solving
skills. These skills are taught and practiced during parent-only,
child-only, and whole-family sessions with individual families
across a total of six to 10 sessions. Family members participate in
activities to increase their emotion vocabulary and learn to use
tools such as a “Feeling Thermometer” with color zones to com-
municate more constructively with one another when they are
becoming distressed. Parents and children develop a common
language for talking about their own and each other’s emotions.
One benefit of these tools is that parents can use them both to
explicitly model regulating their own emotions (e.g., “I’m going
to take a deep breath so I can get back to the ‘green zone’”) and to
support their children’s use of shared emotion language and coping
skills when dysregulated (e.g., “It seems like you’re getting into
the ‘orange zone.’ Let’s go take a walk to get back to the green.”)
A central component of FOCUS is having parents and children
create and share visual narratives as a way of understanding their
own and one another’s experiences in response to key stressful
events and to constructively discuss feelings such as guilt, shame,
or anger that arose in relation to those events. With the support of
a facilitator, this process allows parents to lead the family through
an exploration of how each member was feeling during critical
events and to correct misinterpretations that may have negatively
impacted coregulation. For example, parents and children might
each share how they were feeling at the moment when a parent left
for a military deployment. Such a discussion might reveal that the
deploying parent appeared unresponsive to his child’s distress only
because he did not want to reveal his own sadness about leaving
and cause further distress to the child. By providing an opportunity
for children to hear how their parents were feeling during a
stressful event, how their parents were trying to manage their own
feelings and respond to their child’s feelings, and how they might
deal with feelings more constructively next time, this process
offers children a window into their parents’ emotional lives that is
not typically opened. Importantly, this process targets the very
ESBs that are considered to be critical to children’s socioemotional
development.
Families also develop a plan to support any family member who
is becoming highly dysregulated, an especially important compo-
nent for families who have experienced trauma. Encouraging fam-
ilies to develop such a plan recognizes that when a family member
is experiencing a high level of negative arousal (such as a parent
with PTSD), having a mutually agreed upon set of strategies to
help that member modulate his or her arousal increases the like-
lihood that other family members will stay regulated as well. In a
sample of military-connected families, children in the intervention
showed improvements in behavioral and emotional functioning,
whereas both service member and civilian parents reported de-
creases in anxiety and depression, and improvements in family
functioning, including emotion regulation (Lester et al., 2012);
these gains were maintained at six months postintervention (Les-
ter, Liang, et al., 2016).
Interventions Targeting Specific Child Symptoms
Finally, there are a number of interventions designed to address
specific mental health problems in children that include compo-
nents targeting parents’ emotion regulation. These include the
Triple-P Positive Parenting Program for childhood conduct prob-
lems, parent– child interaction therapy for childhood depression,
trauma-focused CBT, and family CBT for child anxiety.
The Triple-P Positive Parenting Program (Triple P; Sanders,
Markie-Dadds, Tully, & Bor, 2000) is designed to prevent or
reduce behavioral problems in children from birth through adoles-
cence. Triple-P has multiple levels that vary in intensity and target
population, and includes Enhanced Triple-P which is designed for
families who are contending with both child behavioral problems
and parental difficulties, such as depression or interparental con-
flict (Sanders et al., 2000). To equip these parents who are man-
aging their own distress to respond more effectively to their
children, Enhanced Triple-P includes an explicit focus on enhanc-
ing parents’ coping strategies to manage their mood, including
understanding how emotions work, as well as relaxation tech-
niques and other skills for dealing with stress, depression, and
anxiety. In a study with preschool children, both Standard Triple-P
and Enhanced Triple-P were effective in improving children’s
behavior problems compared with a control condition; however,
Enhanced Triple-P produced the most clinically reliable effects
immediately postintervention (Sanders et al., 2000). Notably, at
both 1-year and 3-year follow ups, both Standard and Enhanced
versions yielded similar levels of improvement in children’s dis-
ruptive behavior (Sanders, Bor, & Morawska, 2007; Sanders et al.,
 PARENTAL EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION
2000). Another version of Enhanced Triple-P, designed for parents
at elevated risk for child maltreatment, includes a focus on shifting
parents’ attributions about both their own and their child’s behav-
ior, as well as strategies to help parents better manage their anger
(Sanders et al., 2004). Evaluation of this version of Enhanced
Triple-P versus standard Triple-P showed that parents in both
groups showed improvements from pre- to postintervention in
parental expressions of anger, blame, and negative attributions
about children’s intentions, and unrealistic expectations for chil-
dren’s behavior, although improvements were greater for the En-
hanced group. Similar to the other Enhanced Triple-P study (Sand-
ers et al., 2007), by 6-month follow-up, the Standard group had
caught up to the Enhanced group (Sanders et al., 2004). These
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results suggest that explicitly addressing parental emotion regula-
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tion within Triple-P can facilitate faster improvement, providing
families with relief more quickly and preventing relapse.
Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), a well-validated treat-
ment for young children with disruptive behavior disorders, was
adapted for young children with depression and includes an Emo-
tion Development module (PCIT-ED; Luby, Barch, Whalen,
Tillman, & Freedland, 2018). This additional module aims to equip
parents to help their child understand and manage their emotional
experiences, and although the primary emphasis is on the child’s
emotions, there is also a focus on enabling parents to connect how
their own emotional experiences were responded to in childhood
with how they respond to their child’s current emotion needs.
Parents are taught to help the child recognize what might evoke
negative emotional responses and to support the child through
periods of distress while also managing their own emotional states.
In a randomized controlled trial with preschool aged children
meeting criteria for early onset depression, children in the
PCIT-ED condition showed significantly greater reductions in
symptom severity and were also rated as less emotionally labile
and more emotionally regulated than children in a wait-list control
condition (Luby et al., 2018). Notably, compared with the control
group, parents in the treatment group not only improved in their
use of parenting techniques that supported their children’s emo-
tional development, but also reported decreases in their own de-
pressive symptoms and stress, despite these latter domains not
being a direct focus of treatment (Luby et al., 2018).
Cognitive– behavioral treatments (CBT) are well-established as
an empirically supported approach to treating anxiety disorders in
children and adolescents (Higa-McMillan, Francis, Rith-Najarian,
& Chorpita, 2016). Recognizing the impact of certain caregiver
behaviors (e.g., accommodation, modeling) on the etiology and
maintenance of child anxiety (see Kerns et al., 2017), some treat-
ment developers have adapted child CBT for anxiety (CCBT)
models to family CBT models (FCBT). FCBT models include
parents not only as supporters of their children’s treatment, but as
coclients, and explicitly address parents’ own anxiety and emo-
tional dysregulation (Wood, McLeod, Piacentini, & Sigman,
2009). Parents participating in FCBT are not only taught strategies
for responding constructively to their children’s distress, but are
also taught to use these skills to manage their own distress,
particularly in the context of their children’s anxiety. Although
studies comparing CCBT and FCBT have had mixed findings,
FCBT appears to be superior to CCBT for families in which
parents have an anxiety disorder (Kendall, Hudson, Gosch,
Flannery-Schroeder, & Suveg, 2008) and on longer-term follow up
411
(Wood et al., 2009). Furthermore, parents in FCBT showed a
significantly greater decline in intrusive parenting behavior than
parents in CCBT, which was a mediator of treatment outcome for
early adolescents (Wood et al., 2009).
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is an
empirically supported treatment approach for children with expo-
sure to trauma that includes parents in both individual and conjoint
sessions to address the strong emotional responses they may have
to their children’s experience of trauma (Deblinger, Mannarino,
Cohen, & Steer, 2006). By learning strategies to manage their own
emotional responses, parents are likely better equipped to respond
effectively to their children’s dysregulation in relation to the
traumatizing events, and to help them utilize TF-CBT skills in
managing that dysregulation. TF-CBT may include sessions de-
voted to parental stress management (Cohen, Mannarino, & De-
blinger, 2017) and parents may also benefit from the sessions
preparing them for their child’s sharing of the trauma narrative.
Specifically, these sessions give parents repeated exposure to the
child’s trauma story—which may overlap with their own experi-
ence of the event—as well as time to recognize and regulate their
own trauma-related emotional reactions and cognitive distortions.
Not surprisingly, TF-CBT and other trauma-focused treatments
that include parents have been shown to improve parental emotion
dysregulation (Deblinger et al., 2006; Neill, Weems, & Scheer-
inga, 2018).
The increased focus on parent emotion regulation in treatments
designed to address specific mental health challenges in children
highlights the growing recognition that addressing parents’ own
difficulties with emotion regulation will enhance their capacity to
help their children navigate challenging emotional experiences.
This growing emphasis on parent emotion regulation in child-
focused treatments may open the door to better understanding
whether improvements in parents’ emotional functioning might
mediate positive treatment outcomes for children, informing future
research as well as intervention development and enhancement.
Such findings would point toward the potential promise of two-
generation approaches in which child and parent emotional regu-
lation are both seen as essential and equally important targets of
intervention.
Discussion
Parents’ play a critical role in their children’s emotional devel-
opment (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998, Eisenberg,
Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998; Morris et al., 2017; Morris et al.,
2007); at the same time, children have a remarkable impact on
their parents’ emotional lives (Rutherford et al., 2015). Yet, it is
only within the past two to three decades that child and family
researchers have honed in on parental emotion and emotion reg-
ulation as a worthy outcome of study. Parental emotions (including
emotion regulation) and parental socialization of child emotion are
inherently interconnected, yet the literature in these two areas have
yet to fully merge. Although a growing body of research indicates
that the very act of parenting evokes a multitude of emotions and
that parents’ behaviors are shaped by their emotions, this work
is largely disconnected from research on ESBs. Furthermore, in
developing interventions to improve children’s emotional func-
tioning—which is oftentimes done by enhancing parent emotion
socialization strategies—as a field we have likely underestimated
 412 HAJAL AND PALEY
the challenge of managing one’s own distress when faced with the
task of helping a child who is highly dysregulated. In comparison
with the longer history of interventions that have directly targeted
children’s emotional functioning, it is only relatively recently that
interventions have explicitly targeted parents’ ability to manage
their own emotional experiences as a critical building block for
children’s development of emotion regulation. The tendency to
overlook how much self-regulation is required to provide effective
co regulation is evident in the only recently emerging availability
of programs that specifically address the emotional needs of par-
ents. Marrying these two areas of study—parental emotion and
child emotion socialization— has great potential to push forward
empirical work in the service of improving prevention and inter-
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vention programming for at-risk children and families.
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Emotion in the Context of Parenting: Implications for
Emotion Socialization Research
When studying parental emotions as a critical component of
emotion socialization processes, we must consider that parenting is
a particularly unique context in which to study human emotion.
Specifically, it represents an interpersonal context in which one
person is responsible for the emotional well-being of another
(Rutherford et al., 2015; Teti & Cole, 2011). Emerging theory and
research indicates that some aspects of emotion and emotion
regulation in parenting are unique from other contexts (Hajal et al.,
2019; Rutherford et al., 2015). For example, although anger is
well-established as an approach-oriented emotion across nonparent
samples (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009), a study of mothers of
typically developing 14- to 24-month-olds found that self-reported
maternal anger during challenging parenting situations was asso-
ciated with maternal reports of an urge to disengage, as opposed to
approach. It may be that for healthy parents of typically developing
young children, anger-motivated urges to approach the child are
automatically down-regulated such that mothers are not even
aware of it. In other words, the relation between self-reported
maternal anger and disengagement may reflect an automatic (as
opposed to purposeful) emotion regulation process that is specific
to parenting young children (Hajal et al., 2019). This possibility is
consistent with a recent review indicating that the neurocognitive
and physiological structures supporting emotion regulation de-
velop over the transition to parenthood, and that parents show
different physiological responses than nonparent adults to chil-
dren’s distress (Rutherford et al., 2015). Furthermore, even within
the parenting context, emotion experiences (which may be self-
oriented or child-oriented; Dix et al., 2004) may vary according to
the type and intensity of children’s ongoing emotions and behav-
iors, stage of development, situational variables (including paren-
tal goals), and broad contextual factors (Cole et al., 2013; Dix et
al., 2014; Hastings & Grusec, 1998; Leerkes et al., 2016; Lorber &
Slep, 2005; Martini et al., 2004). For parental emotion research to
drive forward the study of emotion socialization, it is important for
researchers to distinguish between emotions that parents experi-
ence in the context of parenting from general emotions experi-
enced in other parts of daily life. Future research on emotion
socialization would benefit from self-report measures that ask
about specific emotions in response to parenting situations (e.g.,
Bradley et al., 2013; Cole et al., 2013; Hajal et al., 2019) or
standardized parenting-related tasks that capture parents’ emotions
or emotion regulation (e.g., Cole et al., 2003; Leerkes et al., 2016;
Morelen et al., 2016).
One example of how parental emotion-specific information can
be used to inform the field of emotion socialization is reflected in
commonalities across several interventions targeting parental emo-
tion regulation. In line with theoretical and empirical work show-
ing that cycles of parent– child dysregulation are major etiological
and maintaining factors for child emotional and behavioral prob-
lems (Reid & Patterson, 1989), a number of interventions leverage
strategies to disrupt a cycle in which parents respond to child
distress in ways that could cause it to escalate. TIK teaches parents
to build in a pause in moments when their child is becoming
emotionally reactive, to avoid becoming emotionally flooded
themselves. Similarly, RPP’s metaphor of the window of reflection
reminds parents that when they are highly dysregulated, they are
less likely to flexibly consider the options available to them in
responding to their child in a supportive manner. FOCUS intro-
duces the Feeling Thermometer to provide parents with a way to
monitor their own dysregulation (i.e., in the “red”) and recognize
the need to enact their own coping strategies (i.e., getting back to
“yellow” or “green”) rather than responding to their child in ways
that will likely make matters worse. All of these approaches
emphasize the importance of breaking up the chain of automatic,
escalating responses that can occur between parent and child in
emotionally charged moments. Slowing down the process creates
space for parents to access the skills they need to address both their
own and their child’s emotional arousal.
In slowing down these interactions, these interventions may be
allowing parents to better allocate their internal resources during a
process that places multiple demands on them simultaneously;
ultimately, this will enhance their ability to engage in supportive
ESBs. For example, effective emotion coaching requires parents to
enact several steps, including reading the child’s emotional cues,
recognizing these emotions as opportunities for connection and
growth, supporting the child in identifying their emotions, validat-
ing the child’s experience, and then engaging in any needed
problem-solving (Gottman & DeClaire, 1997), all while managing
the multitude of feelings that may arise for the parent in that
moment (e.g., frustration, guilt, embarrassment, fear). Analogous
to the oxygen mask metaphor that is often invoked when working
with parents, these interventions not only give parents permission
to pause but in fact emphasize its necessity. Such pauses may take
no longer than a brief moment, but allow parents to first attend to
their own emotional needs to harness the attentional, cognitive,
behavioral, and emotional resources that are required to respond to
their children’s needs. These pauses may be particularly important
to parents who either react angrily, or conversely, suppress their
own emotional reactions. Creating this buffer may allow them to
rally internally and move quickly and effectively from regulating
their own emotions to also coregulating their child.
Future research integrating parental emotion and emotion so-
cialization would benefit from examination of mechanisms by
which interventions lead to improvements in children’s emotion
regulation skills. When parents are able to utilize strategies such as
emotion coaching skills in response to children’s dysregulation, is
it simply because they have developed improved competency in
those skills, or does the deployment of those skills also rest on
parents’ enhanced ability to regulate their own emotions simulta-
neously? Does knowing they have new skills ready to deploy or
 PARENTAL EMOTION AND EMOTION REGULATION
viewing their child’s dysregulation through a different lens dampen
the negative emotional response that such dysregulation would nor-
mally elicit? The perspective that parenting is affectively organized
would suggest this might be the case, wherein such interventions are
effective because they fundamentally alter parents’ emotional expe-
riences of their children’s negative emotions and behaviors. Or alter-
natively, is it possible that some parents experience the same level of
emotion, but have become more adept at compartmentalizing their
internal responses while responding calmly despite their heightened
arousal (i.e., suppression; Lorber, 2012; Martini et al., 2004)? Phys-
iological measures might help elucidate whether parents are actually
having less of an emotional response to their child’s dysregulation or,
alternatively, having a similarly intense response that they are better
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
able to manage.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Context and Culture
In addition to attention to emotions in the parenting context, it
is also important for future work to integrate broader contextual
and cultural factors into the study of parent emotion as it relates to
emotion socialization. Although the impact of culture on emotional
expression and socialization is recognized in Eisenberg’s theory of
emotion socialization (Eisenberg, Spinrad, et al., 1998), much of
the empirical work on emotion socialization has been conducted in
white, middle-class samples. A recent review of the research on
emotion socialization in African American families replicated
many of the findings of the larger emotion socialization literature.
There were, however, some notable dissimilarities, which ap-
peared to be at least partially attributable to African American
parents juggling their beliefs and values about healthy emotional
expression with historical and current issues of oppression and
safety (Labella, 2018). A recent theoretical integration of emotion
and racial socialization (Dunbar et al., 2017) provides a useful and
critical foundation for future emotion socialization research.
Although most of the basic research on parental emotions to
date has not examined cultural or larger contextual factors, there is
a growing recognition that child and family interventions must
take into account the broader context in which parents are striving
to raise their children. If parents’ capacity to regulate their own
emotions plays a key role in allowing them to coregulate their
children, then interventions are likely to be more effective if they
address broader factors that impact parents’ ability to regulate. For
example, within some cultures, extended family members may be
more likely to play a significant role in caregiving. Family based
models that actively engage all caregivers in interventions (e.g.,
Garcia, Wijesekera, & Lester, 2017) may increase the potency of
their effects across the family system by increasing the likelihood
that all adults who function in caregiving roles are using a con-
sistent set of practices to self- and coregulate emotional experi-
ences. Moreover, by creating an emotionally competent family
system, the emotional load on any one caregiver is reduced,
particularly if caregivers can tap out and ask for others to step in
to deal with an emotionally evocative interaction.
Parents who are socially isolated or struggling to take care of
basic needs (e.g., housing) are less likely to have the internal
resources to regulate their own emotions, much less coregulate
their child. Interventions that help parents build social support and
connect with resources may have a greater impact by allowing
parents to have the mental space to reflect on their own or their
413
child’s emotional experiences. Although not explicitly targeting
parents’ emotion regulation, Child-Parent Relationship Therapy is
a strength-based group intervention with the goal of enhancing
family support and communication as well as coaching parents on
how to reflect their children’s feelings and encourage their chil-
dren’s emotion expressions (Bratton, Landreth, Kellam, & Black-
ard, 2006). An adaptation for low-income immigrant Latinx fam-
ilies involved, in part, modifying group sessions to increase
opportunities for parents to build social connections and share
challenges associated with living in poverty. An RCT found that
intervention group parents reported significantly greater decreases
in children’s behavior problems and parent– child relationship
stress than control group families (Ceballos & Bratton, 2010).
Future work aimed at promoting parent emotion regulation and
emotion socialization will require not only a narrow focus on
parents’ internal experiences during parenting-specific situations,
but also a zoomed out approach that will help to identify the larger
contextual factors that impact parents’ emotions and goals for their
children’s socialization.
Prevention
Although there are a growing number of parenting programs
that explicitly focus on parental emotion regulation, such programs
are often provided within the frame of mental health intervention
for families of children who are already experiencing significant
dysregulation. Improving emotion regulation at the dyadic or family
level may be more difficult when patterns of mutually dysregulating
parent– child interactions have become fairly entrenched (Reid &
Patterson, 1989). Findings demonstrating the interdependency of par-
ent and child emotions (Cole et al., 2003, 2013; Dix et al., 2014;
Lorber & Slep, 2005) underscore the importance of equipping parents
as early as possible to model effective coping and to create a positive
family climate. Furthermore, preventive approaches that are framed in
nonstigmatizing ways during key transitional periods or developmen-
tal hotspots, such as pregnancy, infancy, and adolescence, may result
in better uptake from parents.
Infancy. Parents of infants must rely entirely on nonverbal
cues to discern their children’s emotional states, and even with
emerging language skills, very young children can be quite limited
in their ability to verbally communicate about their emotions. For
the most well-regulated parents, this process can be extremely
frustrating when they misread their child’s cues or cannot identify
precipitants to their children’s distress. For parents who are already
prone to their own dysregulation, the perception that they are
failing in their efforts to meet their child’s emotional needs can be
quite demoralizing, and may set in motion a cycle in which some
parents respond either angrily or simply give up, further escalating
their child. That there are a number of attachment-based interven-
tions that have been developed and tested for this population (e.g.,
Minding the Baby, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catchup, etc.)
reflects the challenging nature of parenting an infant. Taking this
a step further, prenatal programs such as Baby Triple-P (Mihelic,
Morawska, & Filus, 2018) have the potential to fortify parents’
emotion regulation skills proactively during the transition into
parenthood.
Adolescence. Adolescence constitutes a developmental ter-
rain that parents may find increasingly difficult to navigate, having
to strike a balance between continuing to offer their child emo-
 414 HAJAL AND PALEY
tional support while also recognizing their growing need for au-
tonomy, all while managing their own emotions as their child
moves toward adulthood. When adolescents careen from express-
ing intense emotions that seem to call for parental support to
actively rejecting any offers of help, parents may feel understand-
ably frustrated. Although some parents may be able to effectively
make adjustments in how they coregulate their child during ado-
lescence, for others, this developmental period may give rise to
increasingly negative reactions (Havighurst et al., 2015). Although
a number of interventions have been developed to help parents
manage challenging adolescent behaviors that may arise with
increased risk-taking and family conflict, there is a need for
interventions that focus on enhancing both adolescent and parent
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
emotional regulation. As noted earlier, Tuning in to Teens is one
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
such program, demonstrating positive effects on both parent im-
pulse control and emotion socialization and youth externalizing
behavior.
Conclusions
Parenting may be so emotionally evocative because it is deeply
personal. When children are highly dysregulated and seemingly
unresponsive to their parents’ efforts to help them recover, parents
may hear a message that they are failing at their most central task,
which is to take care of and protect their child. When parents are
better able to modulate their own affect—which may be both
intense and quite negative when faced with an emotionally reactive
child—they may be able to shift from experiencing these interac-
tion as something to be merely gotten through to viewing them as
opportunities to build closer and more trusting relationships with
their child (Gottman & DeClaire, 1997). As parents become more
competent in both self-regulating and coregulating, they may begin
to recognize that there is value in children having a full range of
emotional experiences, including even those that may be quite
stressful, when they have supportive parents who can help them
navigate the experience. Although there is still much work to be
done in the effort to promote healthy emotional development for
children and families, the field benefits from a strong theoretical
foundation on parent socialization of emotion (Eisenberg, Cum-
berland, et al., 1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, et al., 1998), upon which
rigorous empirical work has and continues to build. Ongoing work
on parent emotion socialization and parent emotion regulation—as
well as an integration of the two— has great potential to push our
field forward, both in the next generation of research and in efforts
to build and adapt interventions that will promote healthy emo-
tional development for all children and families.
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Received June 1, 2018
Revision received September 24, 2019
Accepted October 7, 2019 䡲