Antecedents and outcomes of parental socialization in response to different stressors among Chinese-heritage families

Abstract

Across three papers, this dissertation project aimed to understand how parents of Chinese heritage socialize their children in stressful, threatening, or emotionally taxing situations, and the effects of these socialization practices on their children’s adjustment. The first paper examined mainland Chinese parents’ socialization that elicits children’s fear and anxiety to obtain children’s compliance (i.e., fear induction socialization) during a COVID-19 quarantine period. Parents’ higher frequencies of consuming COVID-19-related information contributed to their greater use of fear induction socialization, which in turn, contributed to children’s greater engagement in disease prevention practices during the quarantine but more depressive symptoms after the quarantine. Children’s trait anxiety exacerbated the association between parents’ fear induction socialization and children’s post-quarantine depressive symptoms.The second paper used a three-year longitudinal design to investigate precursors and outcomes of Chinese American parents’ awareness of discrimination socialization (AOD) during the anti-Asian racism pandemic. Parents with more COVID-19-related racial discrimination experiences used more AOD socialization in the next year, and this effect was attenuated by parents’ own levels of anxiety. Further, parents’ use of AOD socialization predicted their adolescents’ higher levels of ethnic identity exploration and anxiety one year later. Parents’ sense of competence in racial socialization strengthened the effects of their AOD socialization on adolescents’ ethnic identity exploration and buffered the effects of parents’ AOD socialization on adolescents’ anxiety. The third paper used an observational approach to examine moment-to-moment, transactional links between Chinese immigrant mothers’ two emotion socialization strategies (emotion coaching and emotion dismissing) and their children’s emotional expression. Children’s emotional expression elicited mothers’ more emotion coaching in the next moment, and this effect was attenuated by mothers’ behavioral acculturation to Chinese culture but strengthened by children’s temperamental sadness. Children’s emotional expression also elicited mothers’ more next-moment emotion dismissing, and this effect was strengthened by mothers’ psychological acculturation to Chinese culture but was attenuated by children’s temperamental sadness. Mothers’ emotion coaching and emotion dismissing both elicited more emotional expression in children in the next moment. The effect of mothers’ emotion coaching on children’s next-moment emotional expression was attenuated by mother-child physical proximity and warm emotional climate during their interaction.