Emotion talk in Chinese American immigrant families and longitudinal links to children’s socioemotional competence.

Abstract

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.

Chinese American Immigrant Parents' Socialization of Emotions in Bilingual Bicultural Preschool Children

“…They conclude that varying levels of engagement in the host and home culture can result in differences in emotional expression. Their findings are consistent with other studies which suggest that even among Chinese American immigrant populations there is a lot of heterogeneity in the home environment, socioeconomic status, language background and proficiency, and parenting socialization behaviors as they relate to children's emotion outcomes (e.g., Han and Huang, 2010;Curtis et al, 2020). In our study, parents are Chinese American immigrants who speak Cantonese as the home language with limited English proficiency.…”

“…Chinese American immigrant parents may show different socialization patterns with their child compared to Chinese mothers and American mothers, and that may be associated with different sets of social constructs and parents' cultural orientation (Tao et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2015;Curtis et al, 2020). Chinese American parents may be in the process of adapting to the mainstream American culture (acculturation) while maintaining practices and beliefs in their Chinese culture (enculturation) (Tao et al, 2013).…”

“…Relevant to our study, Curtis et al (2020) used a combination of parent language samples and parent questionnaires to examine the relationship between Chinese American immigrant parents' emotion talk and their school-age (6-9 years old) children's emotion skills (n = 258). While the parent language samples analyzed parents' use of emotion words, questions, and elaborations, the parent questionnaires focused on their child's emotion regulation and social emotional behavioral skills, but not the parents' emotion talk in the home.…”

“…Building upon and adapting from existing parent questionnaires (e.g., Mazzone et al, 2017;Cheung et al, 2019), we implemented a Chinese parent questionnaire to broadly capture immigrant parents' socialization of emotions in the home environment. Additionally, following previous studies (e.g., Aznar and Tenebaum, 2013;Curtis et al, 2020), we implemented parent storytelling tasks and each book elicited a different type of negative emotion word (sad, angry, scared). Parent language that occurs during a storytelling context is more linguistically diverse and syntactically complex than parent language that occurs in play interactions (e.g., Demir-Lira et al, 2018).…”

“…For the parent language samples, we hypothesized that parents may use more angry emotion words compared to the other types of negative emotion words because Chinese parents may be concerned with helping their child regulate anger to maintain social harmony (Fivush and Wang, 2005). Lastly, since parent questionnaires and language samples each provide different information about parents' emotion talk (e.g., Cervantes and Callahan, 1998;Sun et al, 2018;Sun, 2019;Curtis et al, 2020), we expected that the combined use of both may reveal patterns in which emotion words parents use with their children in different contexts.…”