Parents’ Emotional Behavior and Their Children’s Empathy and Emotion Regulation During the COVID-19 Lockdown

Parents play a central role in creating the emotional climate in a family by supporting children’s emotions, identifying emotions, sharing emotions, and providing regulation. This role is especially important during times of change and complexity. This study explored the contribution of the home atmosphere, parents’ emotion regulation, and parents’ emotion expressiveness to children’s empathy and emotion regulation during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel, from March to May 2020. Participants included 343 parents (49 fathers, 294 mothers) and their children (151 male, 192 female) ranging in age from three to eight years (M = 62.01, SD = 18.44). Parents completed a questionnaire on the home atmosphere (relaxed or stressed), their emotion regulation strategies, and positive and negative emotion expressiveness. They also assessed their children’s empathy and emotion regulation. Primary results revealed that parents’ positive expressiveness mediated relations between home atmosphere, parents’ cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression, and children’s empathy and adaptive emotion regulation. Parents’ negative expressiveness partially mediated the relations between parents’ cognitive reappraisal and children’s negativity/lability. The study's findings highlight the importance of parents’ emotional behavior and its connection to their children’s emotional development during the challenging period of the worldwide COVID-19 crisis.