Parental Beliefs About Emotions in a Norwegian Cultural Context: Gender Differences and Relations to Children’s Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Aim: This study aimed to investigate gender differences in parental cultural beliefs about emotions among Norwegian parents, and to examine if there was a relationship between parental beliefs and children’s adaptive emotion regulation. Method: To assess these research questions 291 Norwegian parents of children between the age of 3 and 8 participated in the study. Parental beliefs about emotions were measured through the revised and shortened Parental Beliefs about Emotions Questionnaire, which measures beliefs related to six cultural dimensions based on the Hofstede model. Reliability analyses revealed that only three (Power Distance, Masculinity and Uncertainty Avoidance) of the six dimensions had acceptable levels of reliability, thus only these dimensions were used for the main analyses. Children’s emotion regulation was measured through parent-report of the Emotion Regulation Checklist. Results: Analyses revealed significant gender differences in all three dimensions related to parental beliefs about emotions with small to medium effect sizes. Norwegian mothers were more likely to agree with beliefs related to Uncertainty Avoidance, whereas Norwegian fathers tended to hold more power distant and masculine beliefs. Regression analyses indicated that beliefs related to the three cultural dimensions significantly explained variance in children’s emotion regulation, even after controlling for parents’ and children’s age and gender. Power Distance and Masculinity had a significant unique contribution in explaining the variance in emotion regulation skills, with higher levels of power distant and masculine parental beliefs being associated with less adaptive emotion regulation in children. These findings suggest the importance of considering cultural influences on parental emotion socialization and potential gender differences within the same cultural context, as well as how this, in turn, affects children’s emotion regulatory skills.