Examining Emotional Climates as a Function of Maternal Parenting Style: A Growth Model That Examines Authoritarian Beliefs and Emotional Expressivity During Parent-Child Interaction

Parental emotional expressivity toward their child is an integral component of creating a family emotional climate, which is the primary context in which children develop social-emotional skills. The current study sought to empirically test Darling and Steinberg's model that parent attitudes that make up parenting style effect parental emotional expressivity during parent-child interaction. Using longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), the authors examined the compounding effects of maternal authoritarian attitudes measured soon after birth on maternal emotional expressivity toward their infant across three time points (child at 6, 15, and 24 months old). Hierarchical linear modeling analyses (HLMs) demonstrated that a mother's (n = 1165, M_age = 28.2 years) authoritarian attitudes were associated with both decreased positive expressivity and increased negative expressivity toward their child at 6 months of age. Mothers who held more authoritarian attitudes at baseline demonstrated an increased rate of growth in negative expressivity toward their child over time. Maternal race and income were also significantly associated with the linear rate of growth of negative expressivity over time but not in positive expressivity. This suggests that authoritarian attitudes measured when the child is 1 month old continue to impact parent behavior up to 23 months later. This pattern suggests a potential window for effective universal prevention efforts in promoting nurturing parent behavior and promoting positive parent-child relationships. A possible target of prevention intervention could be providing parents with components of a modularized emotion regulation curriculum. The content could help parents to regulate their negative expressivity toward the child and focus on the message they want to convey to the child related to the child's specific behavior.