Chilean Family Reminiscing About Emotions and Its Relation to Children’s Self-Regulation Skills

Abstract

Research Findings: This study examined the relation between Chilean parents’ narrative participatory styles (i.e., the way in which parents scaffold children’s participation in conversations) and children’s self-regulation skills. A total of 210 low-income Chilean parent–child dyads participated in the study. Dyads were videotaped talking about a past negative and a positive experience at the beginning of prekindergarten. Children’s self-regulation skills (attention and impulse control) were assessed using teacher ratings at the beginning of prekindergarten and at the end of kindergarten. Several parents adopted an elicitor style (i.e., asked a significant number of questions) in conversations about past negative and positive experiences. Parents’ elicitor style in conversations about negative but not positive experiences was predictive of gains in children’s self-regulation skills (attention and impulse control) at the end of kindergarten. Practice and Policy: The findings from this study suggest that parent–child narratives about emotional experiences might be a privileged context to develop children’s attention and impulse control—in particular conversations about past negative experiences. Intervention programs working with low-income Latin American parents may capitalize on these family practices to support children’s self-regulation skills and, in doing so, might help children better prepare for school.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.