Parental emotion socialization (ES) practices are theorized to impact child and adolescent emotion regulation, social competence, and psychological adjustment. However, most empirical studies have been focusing on the US and Western European populations. ES studies in the Majority World are vastly lacking. Cross-national/cultural comparisons usually took a deficit perspective that parents from non-US cultures were usually poor at socializing their children’s emotions. For example, Chinese parents have been depicted as more strict, coercive, controlling, and less affectionate comparing to US parents. However, we believe that it is critical to situate parenting ES research in the specific context.
Chinese people’s understandings of emotions and emotion regulation have changed across time. The related parental ES practices have also changed. When China was a hierarchical and strong-ties society, Chinese people then typically valued emotional control in social interactions to maintain social harmony, avoid conflicts, and protect internal homeostasis. As China transitions to weak-ties global market, along with the one-child policy enacted in 1978, while maintaining traditional values on strictness in moral teaching and academic learning, mainland Chinese parents adopted new values of raising assertive and brave children. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Chinese parents, particularly those affluent urban parents, appears to endorse both traditional Chinese and Western ideologies and practices. This reflects the rapid social and economic changes in China over the past several decades. Thus, contemporary Chinese parents are gradually changing to notice their children’s needs for autonomy and are pay attention to children’s socioemotional competence, thus becoming more authoritative.
Assistant Professor Lixian Cui from NYU Shanghai, together with colleagues from NYU Shanghai (Xuan Li), NYU New York (Niobe Way, Sumie Okazaki, Hirokazu Yoshikawa), NYU Abu Dhabi (Theodore Waters), University of Pennsylvania (Xinyin Chen), Fudan University, and Southwest University published an article in Development and Psychopathology examining how parental emotion socialization practices predicted Chinese adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment. Using the data from a 16-year longitudinal study of Nanjing families with adolescents, the research team focused on parental positive ES practices such as encouraging emotion sharing, talking about emotions, and teaching about emotion regulation and examined the bidirectional associations between such positive practices and adolescent psychosocial adjustment (i.e., self-esteem and depressive symptoms).
Findings indicate that, although Chinese parents may appear less emotionally expressive in socialization than Western parents when using Western norms, parents may express emotions in different ways and still be able to adopt positive approaches in response to their adolescents’ emotions by encouraging them to share and talk about emotions, and teaching about emotions and emotion regulation. More importantly, these practices have positive impacts on adolescent psychosocial adjustment. Further, the study findings add that adolescents’ existing psychopathology may modulate how their parents interact with them or at least how they perceive their parents would interact with them. Overall, it is important to continue doing research in the Majority World to better understand youth development and wellbeing.
This study is part of the 16-year ongoing longitudinal project of families from Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. The project started in 2006 when the adolescents were in the first year of junior high school and the research team followed this group of adolescents up until now. The team is currently planning a new wave of data collection with a mixed method design.
Cui, L., Sun, Q., Way, N., Waters, T. E. A., Li, X., Zhang, C., Zhang, G., Chen, X., Okazaki, S., & Yoshikawa, H. (2022). Prospective within-family bidirectional effects between parental emotion socialization practices and Chinese adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment. Development and Psychopathology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457942200061X