Elterliche Emotionsdysregulation als Risikofaktor für die kindliche Entwicklung

Abstract

Zusammenfassung. Emotionsregulation ist eines der zentralen Themen der Entwicklungspsychopathologie. Der überwiegende Anteil an Forschungsarbeiten widmet sich der Frage zur Entwicklung von Emotionsregulation, welche als zentrale Entwicklungsaufgabe im Kindesalter erachtet wird. Die Herausbildung einer altersangemessenen Emotionsregulation besitzt eine entscheidende Bedeutung für die psychische Gesundheit und dem späteren Schulerfolg eines Kindes. Obwohl die elterliche Emotionsregulation als ein zentraler Aspekt des Erziehungsverhaltens verstanden wird, ist noch immer nicht hinreichend geklärt, wie Eltern ihre eigenen Gefühle im Erziehungskontext regulieren. Dieser Beitrag bietet einen Überblick zum aktuellen Forschungsstand zu den Auswirkungen einer elterlichen Emotions(dys)regulation auf familiäre Prozesse der kindlichen Emotionsregulation und den Entwicklungsergebnissen des Kindes. Empfehlungen für die klinische Praxis werden diskutiert.

Parental Emotion Dysregulation as a Risk Factor for Child Development

Abstract. Emotion regulation in children and adolescents is a major topic in developmental psychopathology. Prior research has focused on the development of emotion regulation – a central developmental task in childhood – and its role in children’s mental health or academic success. While parental emotion regulation is recognized as a central aspect of parenting, the question of how parents regulate their own emotions, in terms of parenting, has not been sufficiently investigated to date. Parents have to cope with a wide range of emotions in daily interaction with their child. What happens if parents support their child’s regulation at the expense of failing to regulate their own emotional state? This article provides an overview of the current state of research on the effects of parental emotion dysregulation on family processes of the child’s emotion regulation and developmental outcome. The ISI Web of Science and PubMed databases were searched for German- and English-language articles. We found 25 studies examining the relationship between parental emotion dysregulation and children’s emotion regulation, parenting practices, emotional climate of the family or children’s adjustment. Results of these studies show a direct effect of parental modeling on children’s emotion regulation strategies. Furthermore, parents reporting higher levels of emotion dysregulation tended toward unsupportive emotion parenting, which in turn was related to higher levels of child emotion dysregulation. Parents with emotion dysregulation also tended to apply harsh, hostile, and rejecting parenting practice. Children of parents with emotion dysregulation have no or only a few opportunities to learn adaptive emotion regulation, which in turn increases the risk for behavioral problems. The results of this review indicate a comprehensive knowledge of parental emotion dysregulation may help to understand and modify difficulties in parenting, or prevent and treat behavior and emotional problems in children and adolescents. Further research is needed to explain which emotion regulation strategies parents use in a caregiving context, and to determine the conditions under which these emotion regulation strategies are useful, in contrast to dysfunctional strategies, in parenting. For clinical practice, the findings of this review indicate that the integration of parental emotion and emotion regulation components into parent training interventions for child psychopathology, such as conduct problems, are important, given their potential impact on child and adolescent development.