Parent emotion talk (ET), a type of emotion-related socialization practice, is theorized to foster children's emotion-related regulation and socioemotional skills. Yet, there has been limited research linking parent ET to children's effortful control, a top-down regulatory process. Despite the observed cultural differences in ET between Chinese and European American families, few researchers tested whether the socioemotional benefits of ET are generalizable to Chinese American families, an immigrant group with contrasting values in their heritage and host cultures. The present study examined Chinese American parents' ET, its associations with sociocultural factors, and prospective relations to school-age children's effortful control, sympathy, and socially appropriate behaviors. In a two-wave (1.5 years apart) longitudinal study of first-and second-generation Chinese American children (N ϭ 258, age ϭ 6 -9 years at Wave 1, 52% from low-income families), the content and quality of parent ET (e.g., the overall quality of emotion talk, frequency of emotion explanations, emotion questions, and number of emotion words) was coded from a video-recorded shared book reading task. Children's effortful control, sympathy, and social behaviors were rated by parents, teachers, and children. Results showed that the Chinese American parents from lower socioeconomic status families, families with lower English proficiency, or more recent immigrants displayed lower ET. Parent ET was prospectively related to children's higher effortful control after controlling for stability, and higher effortful control was concurrently associated with children's higher sympathy and more socially appropriate behaviors. The findings provide empirical support for the socioemotional benefits of ET for school-age children in Chinese American immigrant families.

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Given recent sociocultural and economic changes that have created significant pressures on South Korean mothers, we were interested in understanding the factors that might contribute to their sense of competence in taking on the challenges of childrearing. We examined several family conditions theoretically supportive of mothers’ parenting self-efficacy (PSE), specifically whether mothers’ PSE was associated with their marital satisfaction and with their children’s competence (social and academic). We then examined whether PSE was related to life stress, as well as whether life stress moderated the relationship of PSE to the proximal marital and child variables. Participants included 234 South Korean mothers of pre-primary-aged children. Mothers completed a survey reporting on PSE, life stress, and marital satisfaction. Teachers provided ratings of children’s competence. Regression analyses indicated that mothers who experienced lower life stress reported higher PSE after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. Neither marital satisfaction nor child competence was associated with PSE. A second set of regressions tested the same set of predictors, in addition to the interactions of life stress with marital satisfaction and of life stress with child competence. Results indicated that for mothers reporting lower life stress, greater marital satisfaction was associated with higher PSE. Unexpectedly, for mothers experiencing higher life stress, lower marital satisfaction was associated with higher PSE. These findings support theoretical formulations linking PSE with marital support and life stress, while suggesting a need to further investigate the association among these factors in a variety of situational contexts, particularly those that are appraised as stressful.