PARENTAL META-EMOTION PHILOSOPHY AND THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF FAMILIES -THEORETICAL-MODELS AND PRELIMINARY DATA

This article introduces the concepts of parental meta-emotion, which r efers to parents' emotions about their own and their children's emotio ns, and meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of t houghts and metaphors, a philosophy, and an approach to one's own emot ions and to one's children's emotions. In the context of a longitudina l study beginning when the children were 5 years old and ending when t hey were 8 years old, a theoretical model and path analytic models are presented that relate parental meta-emotion philosophy to parenting, to child regulatory physiology, to emotion regulation abilities in the child, and to child outcomes in middle childhood.