Parental emotion regulation and children's mental health: Longitudinal mediation by parenting stress and sensitive challenging parenting

Models of emotional socialization propose that individual differences in parental emotion regulation influence children's emotionality, adjustment, and mental health. However, there is a relative dearth of longitudinal studies on the mediating processes explaining such an intrafamilial transmission. The current study examines parenting stress and sensitive challenging parenting as mediators between parental use of specific emotion regulation strategies and children's mental health in a three-wave longitudinal study from infancy to middle childhood. The results showed that the use of adaptive as well as maladaptive emotion regulation strategies have a longitudinal effect on children's mental health problems, mediated by parenting stress. Furthermore, the association between deactivating parental emotion regulation and child symptomatology additionally is mediated by lower sensitive challenging parenting. For adaptive emotion regulation, an additional mediation via sensitive challenging parenting moderated by parenting stress appeared. Results emphasize the relevance of parental maladaptive emotion regulation as a risk factor and adaptive emotion regulation as a promotive factor for children's mental health. Moreover, daily family interactions characterized by parenting stress and low parental sensitivity when supporting child's autonomy may be two relevant psychological processes explaining how the way parents modulate their own emotions affects their children. This may also inform mental health prevention. • Parental emotion regulation longitudinally influences child mental health. • Parenting stress and sensitive challenging parenting are relevant mediators. • Adaptive parental emotion regulation is a protective as well as promotive factor. • Maladaptive parental emotion regulation is a risk factor for child psychopathology.