Parental Emotion Socialization in Military Families

Reintegration after military deployment is a significant family stressor. Guided by Eisenberg's heuristic model of socialization of emotions, the present study examined the relationships between parental emotion socialization, children's emotionality and children's internalizing symptoms using a military sample. It was also investigated whether gender of parents and children impacted parental emotion socialization. Questionnaires were gathered from 248 families with a 4-12 year old child (M = 7.78) in which a parent had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Children's emotionality was positively correlated with children's internalizing symptoms and non-supportive parental emotion socialization. Independent-t-tests and two-way ANOVAs showed that mothers reported more supportive reactions towards children's negative emotions than fathers. Father reports of expressive encouragement were positively associated with child reports of anxiety and depression. Child gender did not influence how parents responded to negative emotions. Implications and future directions were discussed.