The Relationship Between Parenting Stress and Children’s Emotion Regulation and Social Skills in Early Childhood

Abstract

Well-developed social and emotional skills gained in early childhood are integral for independent functioning as children enter into school, especially emotion regulation abilities and social skills. Learned through parent-child interactions, researchers have identified parenting stress (i.e., the stress experienced regarding the parenting role) as a factor negatively associated with the development of emotion regulation abilities and social skills. However, the predictive relationship between parenting stress and the development of emotion regulation abilities and social skills, specifically in early childhood, is not well understood. Additionally, previous research in this area has focused mainly on mothers’ reports of their parenting stress and their children’s social and emotional functioning, disregarding fathers’ parenting stress and cross-contextual implications of parenting stress on children’s social and emotional functioning in the school setting. Through a quantitative correlational design, this study examined whether mother- and father-reported parenting stress when their child was in preschool would each predicted children’s emotion regulation abilities and social skills as rated by teachers in Grade 1. Despite significant negative correlations between parenting stress and children’s emotion regulation abilities and social skills, multiple regression analyses showed that high levels of father-reported parenting stress significantly predicted children’s poorer social skills in Grade 1. There were no significant predictive relationships between mother-reported parenting stress and emotion regulation abilities and social skills, nor between father-reported parenting stress and emotion regulation abilities. Limitations, implications, and future directions for research are discussed.