Parents' emotion control beliefs: Links with responses to children's negative emotions, child well-being, and parent-child relationship quality.

Résumé

People hold strong beliefs about emotions. One particularly important belief is whether emotions should be controlled or . We examine these beliefs in parents, specifically, the role these beliefs play in their children's well-being and the parent-child relationship. We propose that parents with stronger emotion control beliefs respond less supportively and more disapprovingly to their children's negative emotions, which in turn could predict worse child well-being and lower parent-child relationship quality. In Study 1 ( = 272), we found that parents' emotion control beliefs were cross-sectionally linked with worse child well-being. This relationship was accounted for by parents providing less supportive and more disapproving responses to their children's emotions. In Study 2 (preregistered analyses; = 272, = 275), we found that parents' emotion control beliefs were cross-sectionally, but not longitudinally (18 months later), linked with some, but not all, measures of parent- and adolescent-reported worse child well-being and lower parent-child relationship quality. In Study 3 ( = 139), we found that parents' emotion control beliefs longitudinally (4 months later) predicted worse child well-being and lower parent-child relationship quality. These links were accounted for by parents providing less supportive and more disapproving responses to their children's emotions. Moreover, these links were relatively generalizable across parents' and children's gender and age (Studies 1-3) as well as parents' ethnicity (Study 3). Together, these findings suggest that parents' emotion control beliefs may influence how they respond to their children's emotions-often for the worse-subsequently shaping the child's well-being and the quality of the parent-child relationship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).