Effects of an intervention to promote parents' emotion coaching skills and their children's emotional competence
Date
2013
Authors
Lee, Su Yeon, author
Barrett, Karen Caplovitz, advisor
MacPhee, David, committee member
Morgan, George A., committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Research has suggested that parents' effective coaching of their children's emotions (helping them label and effectively regulate their emotions) is associated with children's greater development of emotional competence, which in turn is related to positive peer relationships and better school readiness. Yet, research suggests that some parents dismiss their children's emotions, rather than coaching them, and dismissing emotions is associated with negative outcomes for the children. For this reason, the goal of the study was to implement and evaluate a new emotion coaching curriculum for parents. The 15 parents of 21 children ages 3-5 years participated in the intervention and measures of emotional competence on these children were compared to the same measures on 30 same-aged children whose parents did not participate in the intervention. Results provided only weak support for the effectiveness of the intervention. The intervention did not make a significant difference in parental dismissal and validation of their children's emotions. However, there was a significant difference between pre-test and post- test scores for the intervention group in level of children's emotional understanding that was not found for the control group. This would suggest the effectiveness of the emotion coaching intervention. Also, there are some limitations to the current study. First of all, there was no control group for the parent measures. It would result in low internal validity for results about the parent measure in this study. Another issue was that a low participation rate in the emotion coaching intervention (only seven parents from one site and eight from the other). This may have contributed to the inability to find significant findings in the study.