Thinking about feelings: emotion focus in the parenting of children with early developmental risk.
Parents of 8-year-olds with developmental delays speak less about feelings, and this gap forecasts weaker social skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wong et al. (2009) watched parents talk with their 8-year-olds during play. Some kids had developmental delays, some were typically developing.
The team counted how often parents named or asked about feelings. They also asked parents to rank how important emotions are in daily life.
What they found
Parents of children with delays talked about feelings less and rated emotions as less important.
Lower emotion focus linked to weaker social skills in the child.
How this fits with other research
Beaudoin et al. (2022) found the opposite in autism: more mother-child emotion talk predicted better emotional control and Theory of Mind. The difference is age and diagnosis. K et al. studied older kids with broader delays; Marie-Joëlle looked at younger autistic children.
Koegel et al. (2014) extends the story: warm, supportive parent-child moments also boost social skills in preschoolers with autism. Together the papers show both words and warmth matter.
Sasson et al. (2018) conceptually replicates the child side: kids with autism use fewer emotion words themselves, matching the low parent focus seen in K et al.
Why it matters
If you coach parents of school-age kids with delays, add brief emotion lessons. Model labeling feelings during play. Ask parents to do the same for one week. This tiny tweak may lift social skills without extra hours.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with developmental delays exhibit more difficulty with certain emotional processes than their typically developing peers, which seems to partially account for the increased risk for the development of social problems in this population. Despite considerable study with typically developing populations, research on parental emotion socialisation in families of children with delays is scarce. This study examined the degree to which parents of children with early delays prioritized emotion relative to other important areas of child development and the degree to which they focused on emotion during relevant interactions with their children. METHOD: Families of 8-year-old children with (n = 42) and without (n = 89) early developmental delays completed questionnaires and interviews, and participated in a parent-child emotion discourse task. RESULTS: As predicted, parents of children with developmental delays reported lower prioritization of emotion and focused less on emotion during discourse than did parents of typically developing children. A model was supported in which a pathway existed from developmental status through prioritization to emotion focus. Emotion focus, in turn, predicted children's social skills as reported on by multiple informants. CONCLUSIONS: Parents of children with early developmental delays may focus upon emotion less in their parenting than parents of typically developing children, and related behaviours show associations with children's social skill outcomes. Findings are discussed as an initial step in thinking about the role of emotion socialisation in the families of children with delays.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2009.01161.x