Parental en(dis)couragement of emotional discussions with their children: relations with psychopathology symptoms across developmental periods

Introduction This manuscript provides preliminary insight into parents' use of emotion encouragement (EE) and discouragement (ED) in emotion-related discussions with their children, and whether EE and ED differ based on child age. Methods A community sample of 104 children and adolescents ( M age = 8.78 years; 53.8% girls) and their parents (85.2% mothers) completed lab-based emotion discussions for three discrete emotion scenarios: worried/scared, angry/frustrated, and happy/excited. Results Parents were observed to use EE frequently and ED infrequently during discussions, regardless of the emotion being discussed, with child age being unrelated to use of EE or ED bivariately. Contrary to hypotheses, parents were significantly more likely to use EE in the angry/frustrated and worried/scared discussions relative to the happy/excited discussion. They did not significantly differ in their likelihood to use ED across the three discrete emotion discussions. Parent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, but not internalizing symptoms, were associated with observed ED during the worried/scared discussion; no other significant associations between parent psychopathology and EE/ED were found. Two significant interactions emerged between child age and parent EE in predicting child internalizing symptoms, with positive associations found for young children (ages 4–7 years) but not for youth in middle childhood or adolescence. Discussion Collectively, findings suggest a need for emotion socialization research and interventions to consider both the child's developmental period and parent attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms.