Parental Emotion Regulation and Children’s Mental Health Across Cultural Contexts: A Study of Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Families in the United States

Parental emotion regulation plays a critical role in shaping children's psychological adjustment, emotional resilience, and mental health outcomes. However, variations in cultural orientation, immigration experiences, family stress, and parenting practices complicate the identification of these relationships across immigrant and non-immigrant populations in the United States. This study proposes a novel Culturally Adaptive Parental Emotion Regulation and Mental Health Prediction Algorithm (CAPER-MH) to investigate the relationships between parental emotion regulation, cultural adaptation, family socioeconomic characteristics, and children's mental health. The proposed framework integrates multilevel statistical modelling, machine learning, and explainable artificial intelligence to estimate psychological risk while accounting for cultural heterogeneity and family-level dependencies. The study is designed to analyse parental emotion regulation difficulties, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, acculturative stress, parent-child relationships, and children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms using validated psychometric instruments.