A Christian mental health charity is urging parents to discuss
emotions with children following new figures that reveal a record number of children are seeking help from Childline over suicidal thoughts.
The fact that fathers» use of emotion talk was not related to mothers» psychopathology symptoms might be due to our focus on the way parents talk about
emotions with their children rather than the way parents express their emotions and their reactions to child emotions.
It may be due to the fact that fathers discuss
emotions with their children less than mothers, and perhaps socialize children's emotional development by another way, namely their reactions to children's emotions (Mazzone & Nader - Grosbois, 2016; McElwain et al., 2007).
The specific objective was to examine the relations of parents» reactions to children's
negative emotions with children's social and emotional competence at school and to explore the moderating role of children's dispositional emotionality in this relation.
High scores indicates that parents converse spontaneously
about emotions with their children, encourage them to explain their feelings, ask questions about emotions, explain the causes and consequences of emotions, take time to answer their children's questions about emotion, etc..
As suggested by previous studies (Baker et al., 2011; Warren & Stifter, 2008), it would also be interesting to explore the relations between parental emotion - related conversations and parental reactions toward their children's emotions: Are parents who react in a supportive way to their children's emotions those who frequently
discuss emotions with their children?
In a related vein, consistent with theories on emotional contagion according to which intimate partners are highly vulnerable to each other's emotions (Goodman and Shippy 2002), it is conceivable that mothers are biased toward negative emotions due to their partners» psychological difficulties, leading mothers to talk more about
these emotions with their children.