Parental Emotion Socialization in Military Families

Abstract

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 the 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 deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, as part of a larger longitudinal prevention study. Parents reported their emotion socialization approaches and their children's emotionality. Children reported their internalizing symptoms. Through correlation analyses, the results suggested that there was a positive association between children's emotionality and internalizing symptoms, children's emotionality and parental emotion socialization. The findings of independent-t-tests and two-way ANOVAs indicated mothers reported more supportive reactions towards children's negative emotions than fathers. Interestingly, father report of expressive encouragement was positively associated with child report of anxiety and depression. Child gender did not influence how parents responded to negative emotions. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Keywords: deployment; emotionality; internalizing symptoms; parental emotion socialization.

Figure.

Mediation model of the indirect effect of parental reactions to child negative emotions on child internalizing symptoms through child emotionality. a path = direct effects of IV on mediator, b path = direct effect of mediator on DV, c path = total effect of IV on DV, c’ path = direct effect of IV on DV.