Parent emotion talk with preschoolers from low‐income Mexican American and Chinese American families: Links to sociocultural factors

Abstract

Emotion talk (ET), an emotion socialization practice theorized to promote children's emotion understanding and emotion regulation, has been linked to better socioemotional adjustment in diverse samples. Immigrant children face developmentally unique challenges and opportunities related to their multi-lingual and multi-cultural experiences. The present study aimed to identify sociocultural correlates of parent ET in two groups of low-income immigrant families with preschool-age children: Mexican American (MA) and Chinese American (CA) families. In 90 parent-child dyads (child age = 38 to 70 months, 59% girls; 46 Mexican American and 44 Chinese American) recruited from Head Start programs, parents' (mostly mothers') ET quality and quantity (i.e., use of emotion words, emotion questions and explanations, and overall elaborateness of ET) were coded from verbal transcripts of a shared picture book reading task. First, we found similarities and differences in ET across the two groups. Both MA and CA parents used emotion words, emotion questions, and emotion reasoning, whereas linking the story to personal emotion experience was infrequent. MA parents used more negative emotion words, emotion reasoning, and engaged in more elaborate ET than CA parents. Second, we examined the unique relations of multiple sociocultural factors (SES, cultural orientations, parent and child

Emotion socialization in cultural context: Lessons from Asian‐heritage families

“…Chan and colleagues (this quartet) examined family emotion talk, namely discourse about emotional and other subjective experiences, during a shared storybook reading between parents and their preschool‐age children from low‐income Mexican American and Chinese American families. In addition to comparing the content and quality of parent emotion talk between the two cultural groups – the group‐level analysis, the researchers also attempted to understand how various socio‐demographic factors (e.g., child age, gender, generation status, parents’ American and heritage culture orientations) were associated with parent emotion talk – the individual‐level analysis.…”

Relations between self‐regulation and behavioral adjustment in Chinese American immigrant children during early elementary school years

“…It is important to replicate the finding using longitudinal data and other self-regulation measures (e.g., task-based measures). Researchers have also found immigrants' host and heritage cultural orientations are weakly associated with each other, and they relate differently to parenting practices (Chan et al, 2022), highlighting the need to simultaneously consider the roles of host and heritage cultural orientations.…”