Parents' inconsistent emotion socialization and children's socioemotional adjustment

• We present a multi-domain heuristic model of inconsistent emotion socialization.
• We assess within- and between-domain inconsistencies in emotion socialization.
• Parents are largely consistent within and between emotion socialization domains.
• Some emotionally negative parents punish children's negativity.
• Inconsistent emotion socialization is linked to child emotion regulation and internalizing.

Parents socialize children's emotion through active, purposeful strategies and through their own expressivity; yet little research has examined whether parents are inconsistent within or between these socialization domains. The author presents a heuristic model of inconsistency in parents' emotion socialization. Parents (M age = 34.8 years, 85% mothers) of preschool-aged children (M age = 4.5 years, 53% female) reported on their responses to children's emotions, their own expressivity, child emotion regulation and expressivity, child social competence, and child internalizing and externalizing. Parents were largely consistent in their emotion socialization, with one exception being that some highly negatively expressive parents punished children's negative expressivity. This pairing of inconsistent socialization behaviors interacted to explain variance in child emotion regulation and internalizing. The author discusses the implications and limitations of the findings and directions for future research.