Mothers’ Emotional Reactions towards Chinese Preschoolers’ Behavioral Problems: Examining the Specificity of Emotions and Contexts

Grounded in the transactional model of parent-child interactions and the interdependent cultural background of China, this exploratory and descriptive study examined the context-specificity (home vs. school) of Chinese mothers’ emotional responses to children’s problem behaviors and how these emotions may predict children’s subsequent problem behaviors. Sixty-seven mothers of children aged from 3 to 6 (M_{_child} = 4.28 years, SD_{_child} = 0.85) were asked to report on their emotional reactions to a story vignette task depicting examples of externalizing and internalizing problems at school and home. Mothers also reported on children’s surgency (i.e., a temperamental trait that reflects high-energy activation) and problem behaviors at baseline and a 6-month follow-up. Results demonstrated that mothers were more likely to report emotional reactions to children’s externalizing behavior in school, but they were more likely to report child-oriented positive emotions towards internalizing behavior in the home. Mothers’ child-oriented positive emotions in the home predicted decreases in children’s externalizing behaviors. Importantly, for children’s internalizing behaviors, children with low surgency were more sensitive to mothers’ child-oriented negative emotions in the school context, whereas children with high surgency marginally benefited from mothers’ child-oriented positive emotions in the school context.