This short-term, longitudinal interview study used an ecological framework to explore protective factors within the child, the caregiver, the caregiver-child relationship, and the community that might moderate relations between community violence exposure and subsequent internalizing and externalizing adjustment problems and the different patterns of protection they might confer. Participants included 101 pairs of African American female caregivers and one of their children (56% male, M = 11.15 yrs, SD = 1.28) living in high-violence areas of a mid-sized southeastern city. Child emotion regulation skill, felt acceptance from caregiver, observed quality of caregiver-child interaction, and caregiver regulation of emotion each were protective, but the pattern of protection differed across level of the child's ecology and form of adjustment. Implications for prevention are discussed.

The prospective relation of maternal emotion philosophy to children's emotion understanding and regulation and positive and negative adjustment was investigated. Sixty-nine African American youth (50% male; M age = 11.29 years) and their maternal caregivers living in high violence areas of a midsized city participated in this interview study. Caregivers' meta-emotion philosophy predicted child emotion understanding and emotion regulation, which also were associated with Time 2 grades, internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, and social skills after controlling for Time 1 adjustment. Emotional understanding mediated the relationship between caregivers' emotional socialization and boys' internalizing behaviors and between caregivers' emotional socialization and girls' social skills. In addition, emotion regulation mediated the relationships between emotional socialization and all four outcomes for boys. Implications for future work on emotion socialization and clinical intervention, particularly related to emotion regulation, are discussed.

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