Parental playfulness and children’s emotional regulation: the mediating role of parents’ emotional regulation and the parent–child relationship

Young children’s emotional stress reactions during the COVID-19 outbreak and their associations with parental emotion regulation and parental playfulness

“…The current study is one of the few initial attempts to examine the contribution of parental playfulness to children's emotional adaptation and the first to consider it in the context of stressful life events. Based on previous studies suggesting that parental playfulness may contribute to children's emotional adjustment (Cabrera et al, 2017;Cohen et al, 2014;Menashe-Grinberg & Atzaba-Poria, 2017;Schore, 2003;Shorer et al, 2019), we hypothesized that greater parental playfulness would be associated with lower stress reactions among young children during the crisis. Although parental playfulness was not associated with children's stress reactions in the overall sample, greater playfulness in fathers was associated with lower children's stress reactions.…”

“…Parental Playfulness was assessed on the Parental Playfulness Questionnaire (PPQ; Shorer et al, 2019): This is a 20 item self-report questionnaire for parents of children aged 2-8. The PPQ assesses parental playfulness in different everyday parent-child interactions (e.g.…”

“…The final score is the sum of the 20 items, and thus ranges from 20 to 100 (higher scores reflect greater parental playfulness). The psychometric properties of the PPQ have been examined (Shorer et al, 2019) on a sample of 406 parents of young children. The final version of the PPQ showed satisfactory internal consistency (α = .77).…”

“…In the context of parenthood, playfulness is manifested in parents' ability to reframe different situations and interactions with their children in a playful manner, turn dire situations into fun, and act in a flexible, humoristic, creative manner in times of stress or conflict (Shorer, Swissa, Levavi, & Swissa, 2019). Parental playfulness may contribute to children's emotional functioning in several ways.…”

“…This is because children are known to learn about their emotions by using their parents as a model, and by observing their parents' emotional expressions and regulation strategies (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). In recent studies, parental playfulness was found to be associated with improved emotion regulation skills in their children (Shorer et al, 2019) and better emotion regulation in children during play activities (Cabrera, Karberg, Malin, & Aldoney, 2017). Another study examined an intervention aimed at promoting playfulness in mothers of toddlers who were exposed to recurrent missiles attacks.…”