The Roles of Chinese American Mothers’ Stress and Parenting in their Children’s Socio-Emotional and Behavioral Outcomes

Abstract

Parental factors play crucial roles in children’s socio-emotional and behavioral (SEB) outcomes. Despite being the largest subgroup within a rapidly expanding Asian American community in the United States, these processes remain understudied in Chinese American families, particularly given the cultural variations in parenting practices. Across three papers, this dissertation project aimed to explore the determinants of children’s SEB outcomes and the roles of parents within the context of Chinese American families. The first paper examined the associations between Chinese American mothers’ experiences of two types of stress (i.e., general/contextual stress and parenting stress) and their children’s SEB adjustment problems as well as the mediating roles of maternal psychologically controlling parenting (PCP) and maternal warmth in these associations. The results revealed that higher levels of general/contextual stress and parenting stress were each uniquely associated with more maternal PCP practices, which in turn was associated with fewer child adjustment problems. Although surprising, the finding that maternal PCP did not negatively impact child adjustment aligned with some previous research that suggests that such parenting practices are perceived less negatively in interdependence-oriented cultures, such as Chinese culture. These findings highlighted the critical role of cultural context in interpreting the impacts of parenting practices on child adjustment. The second and third papers focused on specific parenting practices, maternal emotion-related socialization behaviors. The second paper explored the mediating role of children’s effortful control in the associations between Chinese American mothers’ positive and negative emotional expressiveness and their children’s SEB adjustment problems. Results indicated that higher maternal positive emotional expressiveness and lower negative emotional expressiveness were each uniquely associated with higher child effortful control, which in turn was associated with fewer child adjustment problems. Our results demonstrated that the positive emotional support provided by Chinese American mothers to children played a crucial role in shaping their children's effortful control, a fundamental capacity that enhances child SEB functioning. The third paper utilized an observational task that is designed to evoke negative emotions in children to examine the associations between maternal responses to child emotions (physical soothing and symbolic/cognitive soothing) and children’s expressed positivity and sadness, as well as the moderating roles of general/contextual stress and parenting stress. The findings revealed that mothers’ parenting stress moderated the relations between mothers’ soothing behaviors and children’s expressed positivity such that children expressed higher positivity following physical soothing only when mothers perceived experiencing low levels of parenting stress. Conversely, children showed lower positivity following physical soothing if mothers perceived experiencing high levels of parenting stress. These contrasting moderation effects highlighted the importance of considering maternal parenting stress in emotion socialization processes. Together, this dissertation project expanded the literature, especially in the areas of emotion socialization and stress theories, by highlighting specificity in processes and the importance of culturally informed research that can inform interventions to improve the development and adjustment of Chinese American families.