Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected people’s daily lives in Turkey along with the rest of the world. Some restrictions, such as shelter in place had been implemented since the 11th of March 2020 when the first case was announced in Turkey. From the 16th of March 2020, education on all levels from preschool to universities was suspended. All sports competitions including football matches, which are an important source of entertainment for people in Turkey, were played without supporters for months. Similarly, places such as gyms, hairdressers, restaurants, cinemas, and theaters were closed, concerts were canceled to prevent the rapid spread of the virus. Considering all these restrictions together, all areas of activity where people could relax were closed. On the 3rd of April 2020, a curfew was declared for people twenty years of age and younger citing the high probability of asymptomatic transmission of the virus, and this restriction continued for several months. Because of these regulations and to protect the elderly from the virus, parents could not receive any help from grandparents to care for their young children which is a widely used caregiving setting for parents in Turkey. Thus, working parents with young children were expected to carry out all the responsibilities of their full-time jobs, care for their children who were obliged to stay at home, and deal with the household chores while also trying to cope with both their own and their children’s difficult emotions with limited help from external sources. Moreover, pandemic related life changes led to diminished self-regulation capacity of children during the COVID-19 lockdown (Alonso-Martínez et al., 2021). In line with these experiences, a meta-analysis on the relationship between COVID-19 and children’s well-being revealed that 35% of children and 52% of caregivers had anxiety symptoms, and 42% of children and 27% of caregivers had depressive symptoms about the pandemic or lockdown (Panda et al., 2021). Likewise, the same study reported that 23% of children were afraid of COVID-19 infection and 35% of them had sleep problems and suffered from boredom. These results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has had some dramatic results on children’s and their parents’ psychological well-being. Consequently, parental emotion socialization (ES) capacities (R. A. Thompson & Meyer, 2007) which would be called upon to guide their children’s emotion regulation and help their children cope with lockdown stress and experience less emotional and behavioral difficulties (Cunningham et al., 2009) may be less evident due to the parents’ own pandemic-related stress. Therefore, it is crucial to take into consideration the interplay between parental ES and children’s emotion regulation capacities to understand the state of children’s well-being during the lockdown. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the moderating role of children’s emotion regulation ability (i.e., capacity to control their negative emotions) on the association between maternal ES strategies (i.e., punitive and minimizing reactions to their children’s difficult emotions) and children’s behavioral difficulties during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Parental ES and children’s behavioral difficulties

Parental ES refers to parents’ guidance and assistance to socialize their children’s emotional expressions during various forms of daily interactions using techniques such as modeling, reinforcement, distraction, discussion, and verbal instruction (R. A. Thompson & Meyer, 2007). Parents may exhibit supportive or non-supportive ES behaviors to their children’s emotional expressions (Yagmurlu & Altan, 2010). Parental problem-focused (e.g., helping the child to solve the problem that caused the negative emotion) and emotion-focused reactions (e.g., parental attempts to help the child feel better) that facilitate the child’s emotional expressions are considered supportive ES strategies. On the other hand, punitive (e.g., scolding and threatening) and minimizing (e.g., discounting the importance) reactions to children’s negative emotional expressions can be considered non-supportive ES strategies. Children who receive the message that their emotions are worthy and acceptable may internalize parental emotion coaching practices, guidelines, and values which may support them to develop more differentiated and self-initiated emotion regulation skills (Cole et al., 2009). Consequently, parental emotion socialization may foster children’s competence to contain their emotions and, in turn, may support children’s self-control ability as one of the most critical developmental milestones in early childhood (Cole et al., 2009; Yagmurlu & Altan, 2010). In line with its importance on child development, parental ES practices are linked to child outcomes such as emotion understanding and prosocial behaviors (McElwain et al., 2007), internalizing as well as externalizing (Cunningham et al., 2009; Johnson et al., 2017) problems. On the other hand, it is also stated that the emotional interactions between parents and children are situated within the cultural ecology in which they live. In other words, emotion socialization (ES) practices are embedded in general child-rearing behaviors, which are shaped by cultural norms guiding caregivers’ socialization responses for culturally appropriate emotion experience and expression (Çorapçı et al., 2012).

Having frequent temper tantrums as well as exhibiting noncompliance, antisocial, disruptive, and aggressive behaviors such as fighting with other children can be seen as manifestations of behavioral difficulties during early childhood period (Goodman, 1997; Johnson et al., 2017). Since parents’ non-supportive ES behaviors convey the message that negative emotional expressions are undesirable and should be avoided, their children may fail to adopt successful emotion regulation skills and may tend to show various aspects of maladaptation such as externalizing problems (Cunningham et al., 2009). In line with this, research has documented that the more parents exhibit supportive ES behaviors, the greater their children’s behavior regulation capacity (Cunningham et al., 2009; McElwain et al., 2007). To summarize, it seems that parental guidance about emotions may foster children’s self-regulation skills and play a protective role in children’s socioemotional and behavioral adjustment (Spinrad et al., 2007).

Parents’ capacity to be aware of and regulate their own emotions (Cunningham et al., 2009) and their tolerance to their children’s negative emotions (Shaffer et al., 2012) tend to be impaired during stressful experiences (e.g., sociodemographic adversities and intra-familial conflict). In line with this, parents’ and their children’s distress have increased, and their quality of life has decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic (Panda et al., 2021). Consistently, a longitudinal study revealed that parents tend to exhibit more non-supportive ES behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Di Giunta et al., 2021). Accordingly, parental non-supportive ES behaviors were found to be related to their children’s emotion dysregulation and internalizing problems while supportive ES behaviors were related to their children’s adaptive emotion regulation during the pandemic (Cohodes et al., 2021; Di Giunta et al., 2021). It is worth noting that many studies conducted during the pandemic primarily concentrated on examining the quality of parental rearing and psychological resources as predictors of children’s behavioral problems, often neglecting to consider the significant role that children themselves play in these interactions. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that children are not passive recipients solely shaped by unidirectional environmental influences. Instead, they actively contribute to and influence the contexts in which their development unfolds In other words, it may be suggested that children’s well-being during such a stressful period may be fully understood by taking into consideration their own characteristics in addition to environmental factors such as parents’ ES capacity (Cole et al., 2009).

Children’s emotion regulation capacity

Children’s ability to regulate their emotions, behaviors, attention, and activity levels may be highly influential on their developmental outcomes (Cole et al., 2009). Emotion regulation, one of the most crucial individual characteristics, refers to the individuals’ capacity to modify their emotional experiences and expressions as well as these emotions’ intensity, frequency, and duration (Gross et al., 2006). Children’s emotion regulation does not only play a direct role on their behaviors but also it may shape the associations between environmental influences (e.g., parenting) and child outcomes (Hastings & De, 2008; Scott & Hakim-Larson, 2021; Yagmurlu & Altan, 2010). The dual-risk and the differential susceptibility hypothesis are two highly investigated frameworks highlighting the role of the interaction between individual and environmental factors in children’s adjustment. According to the dual-risk model, children having difficulty regulating their emotional expressions (e.g., reactive temperament) may be at more risk if they experience negative parenting influences, and they may not benefit from positive child-rearing environments as much as their peers who are more successful to regulate their emotional expressions (Sameroff & Seifer, 1983). To exemplify, children who have poor self-regulation skills exhibit more internalizing and externalizing problems when their parents do not support children’s emotions (Hastings & De, 2008). The differential susceptibility hypothesis, on the other hand, proposes that individuals would be disproportionately prone to environmental influences for better or for worse if they have difficulty in emotion regulation (e.g., reactive temperament) (Belsky et al., 2007). Specifically, the differential susceptibility hypothesis suggests that children who have difficulty regulating their emotions and are more prone to frustration may be at particular risk when they are exposed to negative rearing practices and may benefit more from positive parenting influences compared to their less reactive peers.

When children struggle with regulating their emotions, parents may experience frustration, leading them to employ punitive and non-supportive emotional socialization reactions (Yagmurlu & Altan, 2010). On the other hand, they may tend to react in more supportive and constructive ways to their children who have higher self-regulation capacity (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1994). For instance, mothers tend to be less supportive with children who exhibit a higher susceptibility to anxiety. Additionally, when children display emotional reactivity, mothers are more prone to exhibiting rejecting behaviors in response to their children’s emotions (Scott & Hakim-Larson, 2021). However, it is important to note that more reactive children often rely more on parental assistance for self-regulation (Mirabile et al., 2009). Unfortunately, these children face an increased risk of encountering challenges, such as behavior problems, which may stem from ineffective self-regulation (Tsotsi et al., 2021). To illustrate, a short-term longitudinal study conducted with second-generation Turkish immigrant families in the Netherlands demonstrated that positive parenting practices observed at the age of 2 years (Time 1) had a negative association with children’s aggression one year later (Time 2), but only among those with limited self-regulation capacity, which was also assessed at the age of 2 (Yaman, 2009). This finding supports the notion that the dual risk model may become more applicable particularly during exceptional and challenging situations like the pandemic. According to this model, children who struggle with self-regulation and simultaneously face adverse parenting influences are more susceptible to displaying aggressive behaviors, amplifying their risk (Shaffer et al., 2012). These children were unable to fulfill their basic needs, such as playing outside, during lockdown. The failure to meet these needs may have intensified the emotional regulation difficulties they were already facing. This challenging life event might prompt an increased need for parental support among emotionally reactive children. However, as mentioned earlier, the stress brought on by the pandemic may make it difficult for parents to provide the necessary support, potentially leading to non-supportive emotion socialization reactions.

The existing literature documents the connections between parental ES behaviors and their children’s emotional difficulties during the pandemic (e.g., Di Giunta et al., 2021). However, comparatively less attention has been given to examining the connection between parental ES and children’s behavioral difficulties in this context. Furthermore, the role of a child’s individual characteristics in understanding the impact of environmental influences on their adjustment during the pandemic has been largely overlooked. To the best of our knowledge, only one study that was conducted during the pandemic has explored the interaction between parenting stress and preschoolers’ sensitivity to environmental inputs in predicting children’s internalizing and externalizing problems (Lionetti et al., 2022). Notably, the findings revealed that a child’s individual characteristics was a significant moderator on the association between parenting influences and preschoolers’ externalizing but not internalizing during the pandemic. The results, consistent with the differential susceptibility hypothesis, indicated that children who were more sensitive to environmental influences (i.e., high in fearful temperament) exhibited greater decrease in externalizing behaviors only when parenting stress was low. Although these findings highlight the importance of investigating the interactive role of parenting influences and child’s individual characteristics, particularly in relation to externalizing behaviors, there remains a need for research that directly measures parenting behaviors rather than solely assessing parenting stress, as was done in Lionetti et al.’s (2022) study.

Moreover, ES studies also point out that there are cultural differences in parental acceptance and support for the child’s emotions. For example, in many East-Asian societies that value interpersonal bonding, mothers have accepted their children’s expression of anger less than sadness and sympathy; consistent with their individual-oriented culture, Western parents have been more likely open communication of emotions such as anger and pride that support self-assertion (Yang & Wang, 2019). A study on ES of preschoolers has revealed that Turkish mothers tend to encourage the expression of sadness more than anger consistent with collectivistic cultural tendencies. Moreover, it was pointed out that teaching the child appropriate behavior in everyday life also seems to be an important component of ES for Turkish mothers, although the study illustrated that both supportive (e.g., comforting, distracting, reassuring) and non-supportive (i.e., punitive, condescending) ES responses, which were detected in the Western literature, have also been exhibited by Turkish mothers (Çorapçı et al., 2012). The norms determined by the culture and the ES support of their parents form the basis for children’s self-regulation skills and their reactions toward variable situations (Yang & Wang, 2019).

The current study

Considering that aggressive behaviors (e.g., biting, hitting, kicking) are already quite common in the early childhood (Basten et al., 2016) and parental ES behaviors may be critically important in these young children’s coping with the pandemic-related life changes (Cohodes et al., 2021; Di Giunta et al., 2021), this study aims to investigate the interactive role of parental ES and children’s emotion regulation capacity to understand children’s behavioral problems during the COVID-19 lockdown. Specifically, we aim to examine the moderating role of children’s emotion regulation capacity (i.e., negative emotionality and effortful control) on the associations between maternal non-supportive ES behaviors and children’s externalizing problems. Given the chaotic and distressing nature of the pandemic, coupled with the disproportionate burden of pandemic-related stress on female, compared to male, caregivers (Wade et al., 2021), this study specifically focuses on non-supportive emotional socialization behaviors. This deliberate choice is made to ensure that the study does not overly burden mothers who are caring for young children during the lockdown, with limited external support and simultaneous work commitments. The survey we distributed to mothers included a substantial number of questions. Recognizing the extensive workload already borne by mothers, we deliberately avoided imposing an additional burden. Consequently, we narrowed the study’s focus exclusively to non-supportive emotion socialization (ES) behaviors. This approach aimed to reduce the time and effort demanded from participating mothers while simultaneously directing attention to this crucial issue. Since children’s temperament is a highly used proxy for children’s emotion regulation ability, this study examines children’s negative emotionality and effortful control temperamental characteristics as tapping into their capacity to regulate their emotions. Negative emotionality refers to the intensity and frequency of anger, fear, and sadness expressions (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Effortful control is considered their propensity to inhibit a dominant response, and direct focus and impulses to activate a sub-dominant and, probably, a more acceptable response (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003).

Our study aimed to investigate the relationship between maternal non-supportive ES practices and children’s behavioral difficulties, with a specific focus on the moderating role of children’s emotion regulation capacity during the COVID-19 lockdown in Turkey. Based on the unique and stressful conditions under investigation, we hypothesized that the association between maternal punitive ES reactions and children’s behavioral problems would be moderated by children’s level of emotional reactivity, characterized by higher negative emotionality and lower effortful control. Specifically, we expected that reactive children would exhibit more behavioral difficulties in response to maternal punitive ES reactions, in line with the dual-risk model. Building on previous research indicating cultural inconsistencies in the role of minimizing ES practices on children’s adjustment in Western and non-Western cultures (Chan et al., 2009; Tao et al., 2010), we did not have a specific hypothesis regarding the moderating role of children’s emotion regulation on the association between maternal minimizing ES practices and children’s externalizing behaviors. However, drawing from the cultural context of our study, we anticipated that moderately harsh and minimizing ES strategies in non-Western cultures, such as Turkey, might be considered as attempts to comfort their children and guide them toward appropriate behavioral conduct. In turn, this may not be associated with impaired behavioral adjustment.

Covariates

Maternal psychological distress has been consistently linked to their suboptimal parenting behaviors and, in turn, their children’s higher mental health problems and behavioral difficulties (Tsotsi et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2021). Moreover, parents’ marital relationship is one of the other highly-investigated predictors of the parent-child relationship quality, parenting behaviors, parents’ ES practices, and finally children’s emotional and behavioral problems (Erel & Burman, 1995). In line with these pre-pandemic findings, it also was revealed that mothers’ marital satisfaction was positively related to their perceptions of their infants’ warmth during the COVID-19 pandemic (Chasson et al., 2021). Additionally, parents’ lower psychological well-being was related to greater harsh parenting which, in turn, their children’s higher mental health problems (Wang et al., 2021) and behavior difficulties (Lionetti et al., 2022) during the pandemic. Consequently, it can be suggested that maternal psychological distress and interparental conflict may be considered risk factors for both their deteriorated ES capacity and their children’s behavioral difficulties. Therefore, maternal psychological distress and interparental conflict were set out as covariate variables to control their potential effects on parenting behaviors and child outcomes and the measures are explained below.

Method

Participants

A total of 541 parents participated in our study. However, we excluded 243 participants (mothers = 231, fathers = 12) who did not complete the questionnaires evaluating the main study variables. Moreover, 19 fathers were excluded because of the disproportionate numbers of mothers and fathers, and 31 participants were excluded because of the ages of their children did not meet the inclusion range for this study which is between 34- and 72-months old. The final participant group consisted of 248 mothers ranging in age from 25 to 48 (M = 34.2, SD = 3.4) who have at least one preschool child between 34 and 72 months (M = 51.8, SD = 11.0, 52% males). All participant mothers were biological parents, and most of them (92.7%) were married to the focal child’s biological father. Most of the mothers had only one (55.2%) or two (39.5%) children. A significant number of the mothers had undergraduate (56.0%) or graduate (26.2%) degrees. The rest of the mothers obtained college (9.7%), high school (5.6%), middle school (0.8), or primary school (1.6%) diplomas. All participants were Caucasian, and their native language was Turkish.

Procedure

Data was collected through an online survey via Survey Monkey from June 1 to July 1, 2020, during a national COVID-19 lockdown in Turkey. All schools were closed, and people under the age of 20 were not allowed to leave their houses unless there was a health-related emergency. A website link to the survey was shared with the participants through social media and the snowballing method was used by asking the participants to forward our link to other parents meeting the inclusion criteria. Informed consent including the full description of the study was located on the first page of the survey and the participants needed to agree on their participation in the study to move forward to the demographics and questionnaires. They then first answered socio-demographic questions and a few questions concerning the pandemic. If they have more than one child between 34 and 72 months of age, we asked them to choose one of the children meeting the inclusion criteria and answer all questions for that specific child. The survey took about 10 min to be completed, and participation was entirely voluntary, with no incentive (e.g., credit, money, voucher) for participation. The data of the participants who left the survey incomplete were excluded from the study. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of Ankara Medipol University.

Measures

Maternal ES

The Turkish version of the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) was used to evaluate maternal ES practices (Fabes et al., 1990). CCNES measures parental reactions to their children’s emotions such as being upset, scared, and angry in distressful situations. The mothers were presented with 12 scenarios depicting their children in a dysregulated emotional state. In the original scale, each scenario is followed by six parental reactions (i.e., distress, punitive, expressive encouragement, emotion-focused, problem-focused, and minimization) to cope with children’s emotions in hypothetical situations. However, the current study focuses only on the non-supportive ES dimensions (i.e., punitive and minimization). To illustrate, each scenario (e.g., “If my child becomes angry because he/she is sick or hurt and can’t go to his/her friend’s birthday party”) was followed by only punitive (e.g., “Tell my child that if he/she doesn’t stop then he/she won’t be allowed to go out anymore.”) and minimizing (e.g., “Tell my child to quit overreacting and being a baby���) parental ES reactions. After reading each scenario and the possible parental ES reactions, mothers were asked to rate the likelihood that they would exhibit these punitive and minimizing reactions on a 5-point scale (1 = very unlikely to 5 = very likely). Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency scores of punitive (α = 0.75) and minimizing (α = 0.83) reactions subscales were acceptable. Higher scores indicate greater punitive and minimizing reactions to children’s difficult emotions.

Children’s emotion regulation

Mothers reported their children’s emotion regulation capacity using the Turkish version of the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart et al., 2001). The CBQ assesses the temperament of children between 3 and 7 years old. It includes 18 subscales that load onto three temperament dimensions (i.e., surgency, negative emotionality, and effortful control). Only negative emotionality and effortful control dimensions were used in the present study. Negative emotionality was assessed with the composite score of frustration and reversed soothability. Frustration reflects a child’s negative emotions related to interruption of ongoing tasks or goal blocking (13 items, e.g., “Has temper tantrums when s(he) doesn’t get what s(he) wants.”). Soothability is defined as the rate of recovery from peak distress, excitement, or general arousal (13 items, e.g., “Has a hard time settling down for a nap.”). Children’s effortful control temperament dimension is assessed using inhibitory control subscale of the CBQ. The inhibitory control subscale reflects children’s capacity to stop, moderate, or refrain from behavior under instruction (13 items, e.g., “Can lower his/her voice when asked to do so.”). The mothers rated the scale items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from never to always. Factor analysis indicated a 2-factor solution confirming that frustration and soothability (loading negatively) items loaded onto the negative emotionality dimension, and inhibitory control items loaded onto the effortful control dimension. Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency scores of negative emotionality (α = 0.84) and effortful control (α = 0.83) scales were satisfactory. Higher scores indicate greater negative emotionality and effortful control.

Children’s behavioral difficulties

Mothers reported their children’s behavioral difficulties using the Turkish version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). The SDQ aimed to evaluate 3–16 years old children’s strengths and difficulties as detected by their parents. It includes five subscales (i.e., emotional, conduct, hyperactivity and peer problems, and prosocial skills) each scale consisting of five items. Only the conduct problems (e.g., “Often has temper tantrums or hot tempers”) subscale was used in the scope of the current study to evaluate children’s behavioral difficulties. The items were scored on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never to 5 = always). Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency score of the scale is 0.66. Higher scores indicate greater behavioral problems.

Maternal psychological distress

The Turkish version of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983) was used to assess maternal psychological distress over the past seven days. BSI consists of 53 items (e.g., “Idea that others can control thoughts”, and “Feeling lonely”) yielding a global severity index covering nine symptom clusters, namely Somatization, Obsession-Compulsion, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Depression, Anxiety, Hostility, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation, and Psychoticism. Only the global severity index was used in the current study. The items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from never to always. Factor analysis confirmed a one-factor global severity index, and Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency score was 0.96. Higher scores indicate greater psychological distress during the last seven days.

Interparental conflict

The Turkish version of the O’Leary-Porter Conflict Scale (Porter & O’Leary, 1980) was used to assess how often marital hostility behaviors (e.g., quarrels, sarcasm, and physical abuse) are performed in front of the child in general. The scale consists of 10 items (e.g., “How often do you and/or your spouse display verbal hostility in front of your child?”). A 4-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (never) to 4 (always) is used to score the items. The Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency score of the scale was 0.78. Higher scores represent greater marital conflict.

Data analytic plan

The moderation analyses were conducted using “interactions” package (Long, 2019) in R software (R Core Team, 2022). For all analyses, children’s emotion regulation abilities (i.e., negative emotionality and effortful control) are constructed as moderating variables with maternal emotion socialization practices (i.e., punitive and minimizing reactions) are entered as the independent variables. Aforementioned covariates (i.e., interparental conflict and maternal psychological distress) were included in all models based on their correlations with study variables (please see Table 1). We conducted simple slope analyses to investigate the distinct relationships between dependent and independent variables in terms of the subgroups of the moderators (+ 1 SD of the mean and − 1 SD of the mean). All continuous variables that define the outcome variable were mean centered to avoid multicollinearity in the interaction terms.

Table 1 Means, standard deviations, and correlations with confidence intervals
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Results

Preliminary analyses

Descriptive statistics and zero-order bivariate correlations for study variables are presented in Table 1. Results revealed that maternal punitive and minimizing ES reactions were positively related. Additionally, maternal punitive ES reactions were positively related to their children’s behavioral difficulties and negative emotionality. Children’s behavioral difficulties were positively related to their negative emotionality. Children’s negative emotionality and effortful control were negatively associated. In terms of the relationships between study variables and covariates, maternal psychological distress was negatively associated with children’s effortful control and positively associated with children’s negative emotionality and behavioral problems. Interparental control was positively related to maternal punitive ES reactions, children’s negative emotionality and behavioral problems and negatively related to children’s effortful control. Based on their significant associations with the study variables, maternal psychological distress and mother-reported marital conflict were controlled in all further regression analyses.

Most mothers (83.9%) indicated that either themselves or their husbands had a job when the data was collected. However, independent-groups t-test analyses revealed no significant differences in the study variables based on employment status (all ps > 0.05). Moreover, 34.7% of the mothers stated that their household income had decreased because of the pandemic. Independent-groups t-test analyses indicated that mothers (M = 2.11, SD = 0.66) who reported that their family income decreased because of the pandemic reported significantly higher minimizing reactions to their children’s difficult emotions compared to the mothers (M = 1.90, SD = 0.52) who indicated that there was no decrease in their family income, t(246) = 2.82, p < .01. Only 3.2% of the mothers indicated that a nuclear family member had been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Independent-groups t-test analyses revealed no significant differences between the study variables based on COVID-19 history (all ps > 0.05).

Regression models

Negative emotionality

Analyses revealed that children’s negative emotionality was a significant moderator on the relationship between maternal punitive reactions and children’s behavioral difficulties scores, F(5, 221) = 41.96, p < .001, R2 = 0.49, Adj. R2 = 0.48. Simple slope analysis showed that maternal punitive reactions positively predicted children’s behavioral difficulties only for children with high negative emotionality (b = 0.32, SE = 0.09, t(221) = 3.62, p < .001). In contrast, maternal punitive reactions negatively predicted children’s behavioral difficulties for children with low negative emotionality (b = − 0.17, SE = 0.09, t(221) = -1.99, p < .01). Finally, maternal punitive reactions and children’s behavioral problems were not related for children with moderate levels of negative emotionality. The details are presented in Table 2; Fig. 1 (Panel A).

Table 2 Negative Emotionality Moderates the Association between ES and Behavioral Problems
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Fig. 1
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Two-Way interaction of maternal emotion socialization practices and children’s negative emotionality in predicting children’s externalizing behaviors

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Furthermore, children’s negative emotionality was also a significant moderator in the association between maternal minimization reactions and children’s behavioral difficulties, F(5, 221) = 40.34, p < .001, R2 = 0.47, Adj. R2 = 0.48. Simple slope analysis showed that maternal minimization reactions negatively predicted children’s behavioral difficulties for the ones with low negative emotionality (b = − 0.17, SE = 0.06, t(221) = -2.73, p < .05). On the contrary, it positively predicted children’s behavioral problems when children’s negative emotionality scores are high (b = 0.15, SE = 0.06, t(221) = 2.47, p < .05). The association was not significant when children’s negative emotionality scores were moderate. The details are presented in Table 2; Fig. 1 (Panel B).

Effortful control

Secondly, we investigated the moderating role of children’s effortful control on the association between maternal ES strategies and children’s behavioral problems. Results revealed that the moderation model was significant, F(5, 221) = 48.02, p < .001, R2 = 0.52, Adj. R2 = 0.51. Simple slope tests showed that maternal punitive ES strategies positively predicted children’s behavioral difficulties when their effortful control scores were low (b = 0.31, SE = 0.09, t(221) = 3.59, p < .001) and moderate (b = 0.15, SE = 0.06, t(221) = 2.45, p < .05). The association was not significant for children with high effortful control. The details are presented in Table 3; Fig. 2 (Panel A).

Table 3 Effortful Control Moderates the Association between ES and Behavioral Problems
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Fig. 2
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Two-Way Interaction of Maternal Emotion Socialization Practices and Children’s Effortful Control in Predicting Children’s Externalizing Behaviors

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Finally, children’s effortful control moderated the association between maternal minimizing ES reactions and children’s behavioral problems, F(5, 221) = 45.33, p < .001, R2 = 0.51, Adj. R2 = 0.50. The association between maternal ES practices and children’s behavioral problems was only positively associated for the children with low effortful control, (b = 0.13, SE = 0.06, t(221) = 2.14, p < .05). The relationship was not significant when children’s effortful control scores were moderate or high. Table 3; Fig. 2 (Panel B) show the statistical details of the analysis and the interaction plot, respectively.

Discussion

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a dramatic experience for every human being around the globe and it has contributed to poorer mental as well as physical health. To reduce the contagion, the Turkish government quarantined individuals 20 years of age and younger for months. Therefore, young children who were restricted from the outer world and their parents who most possibly had to work from home while caring for their children were amongst the most challenged populations. Studies focusing on children’s adjustment during the pandemic revealed inconsistent findings regarding the impacts of this difficult experience on children’s emotional and behavioral difficulties. In a developmental-ecological framework, it may be suggested that to fully understand children’s disruptive behavior, the complex interactions between children’s individual and environmental characteristics need to be taken into consideration, particularly during stressful periods (Loeber et al., 2009). Taking this perspective into account, the objective of this study was to explore how preschoolers’ ability to regulate their emotions moderates the associations between their mothers’ ES practices and their externalizing problems. Our hypothesis suggesting that the relationships between maternal ES behaviors and children’s behavioral difficulties would be moderated by children’s emotion regulation ability was partially supported. Our findings demonstrated that a positive correlation existed between maternal punitive reactions and children’s behavioral difficulties, but only among children with high negative emotionality and low effortful control. Similarly, maternal minimizing ES reactions were positively associated with children’s externalizing behaviors, but again, this was observed primarily in children with high negative emotionality and low effortful control.

In line with the diathesis-stress model (Sameroff & Seifer, 1983), these results pointed out that children with low emotion regulation capacity (i.e., high negative emotion and low effortful control ability) might be more vulnerable to detrimental environmental influences (i.e., their mothers’ non-supportive reactions to their difficult emotions) and may exhibit more externalizing behaviors. In other words, mothers’ tendency to exert harsh parenting practices may pose an additional risk factor for children’s elevated externalizing problems for only the ones with limited capacity to regulate their emotional outbursts. In line with our findings, considerable research has produced evidence showing that non-supportive parental ES practices that punish or ignore the child’s emotions are related to both children’s diminished self-regulation capacity and also elevated behavioral difficulties (Mirabile et al., 2009). Caring for children who have difficulty in emotion regulation may be more demanding for parents as their children may need more parental assistance during the daily emotional outbursts (Yagmurlu & Altan, 2010). Consistently, they tend to use non-supportive ES reactions to their children who had difficulty to regulate their negative emotions while exerting supportive and constructive ES reactions when their children are good at self-regulation (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1994).

Additionally, we observed a contrasting pattern for maternal minimization ES behaviors. These behaviors were found to be negatively associated with their children’s behavior problems when the children’s negative emotionality scores were low. In other words, maternal non-supportive ES reactions play a protective role for children’s externalizing behaviors only if children have the capacity to regulate their negative emotions. Like many studies in this field, we assessed parental emotional socialization practices using the CCNES, which was developed based on the Western perspective on emotion. According to the CCNES, punitive and minimization reactions are classified as non-supportive parental responses to children’s difficult emotions, based on their positive associations with child maladjustment in US culture. Consistent with findings in Western cultures, studies conducted in non-Western cultures have also shown a consistent link between parental punitive emotional socialization behaviors and children’s externalizing problems (Tao et al., 2010). However, in contrast to studies conducted in Western countries, evidence from non-Western cultures suggests that minimizing ES reactions may not have the same detrimental impact as observed in Western societies. To illustrate, Hong Kong–Chinese mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children endorsed minimizing ES reactions as much as encouraging responses to their children’s emotional expressions (Chan et al., 2009). In line with this cross-cultural difference, our results also showed that mothers’ minimizing responses to children’s difficult emotions were not significantly related to child adjustment unlike their punitive reactions which were positively associated with children’s externalizing problems (see also Tao et al., 2010). However, in terms of the moderation analyses, both punitive and minimizing reactions have been found as protective factors for children’s behavioral adjustment when children’s are skilled to regulate themselves. This finding suggests that children may readily adhere to their mothers’ expectations of socially appropriate behavior, indicating a significant impact of maternal influence. However, compliance does not necessarily correlate with the possession of effective emotion regulation skills. Maternal non-supportive ES reactions, such as punitive or minimizing responses, may lead children to adopt a prolonged and maladaptive self-regulation strategy, particularly emotional suppression. In contrast, within collectivist cultures, there is a tendency to utilize emotion suppression as a self-regulation strategy (Matsumato et al., 2008). Moreover, mood disorders in these cultures may manifest more prominently through somatic symptoms rather than cognitive and behavioral symptoms (Kleinman, 2004). This finding suggests that in collectivist societies, non-supportive ES reactions could prompt children to employ emotion suppression strategies more frequently, potentially heightening their risk of developing depression in adulthood. It’s important to note that while punitive and minimizing maternal behaviors appear linked to childhood behavioral adjustment, they may not necessarily equip children with the necessary emotional regulation skills for long-term well-being.

As a country going through a substantial change during the last decades, it is difficult to categorize Turkey in the individualism and collectivism dichotomy (Sunar & Fisek, 2005). Although social change has created an independence from the family members, emotional interdependence or mutual emotional attachment maintains its importance in the culture (Kagitcibasi, 2012). Such that, emotional family interdependence and warmth are critically important as much as the parental authoritarianism in family dynamics. In line with this, parents’ punishing and minimizing reactions to their easily soothable children with low negative emotionality may be followed by soothing and scaffolding behaviors to teach their children behaviors that are appropriate to the societal values and norms which is a crucial aspect of parental socialization practices in Turkish culture. Considering that culturally appropriate display of emotion is crucial to be accepted and included in society), moderately harsh and minimizing ES strategies may be read as parental efforts to teach their children proper behavioral conduct in line with the norms and customs of non-Western societies. Consequently, parents’ may not consider non-supportive ES behaviors as invalidating their children’s distress but instead as an attempt to comfort them (Friedlmeier et al., 2011). In line with the other studies (e.g., Mirabile et al., 2009), our results may point out that especially children who are better at regulating their emotional and behavioral expressions may benefit more from their mothers’ behaviors aiming to sooth them and exhibit fewer externalizing behaviors, even though their parents may not adopt the same soothing behaviors as the parents in Western countries.

Notably, simple slope analysis focusing on children’s effortful control as moderators showed fewer significant associations than the analysis where negative emotionality was the moderator. Even though both negative emotionality and effortful control are among the important predictors of children’s behavior problems (Muris, 2006), our study suggests that children’s general reactivity level to unpleasant or threatening stimuli and the intensity and duration of the emotion may be a more critical factor shaping the link between maternal ES behaviors and their children’s behavioral challenges. Considering that effortful control is closely related to executive functioning which encompasses behavior regulation abilities, negative emotionality that taps into emotion regulation may play a more important role in interacting with mothers’ ES behaviors which are also emotion-related capacities on the part of mothers. Additionally, under the stressful conditions and obscurity of a global pandemic, children’s frustration, temper tantrums, and difficulty in soothability may be more dominant for mothers and, in turn, play a more significant role in the quality and/or consistency of their ES behaviors. Moreover, since we focused only on non-supportive ES reactions, children’s negative emotions, instead of effortful control, might be more aligned with these aspects of parenting behaviors, and the role of effortful control on adjustment problems may be better understood if the negative emotionality is controlled in the analyses in the future studies. Finally, negative emotionality is manifested in more visible emotion regulation behaviors compared to effortful control which may consist of more subtle capacities of children. Therefore, especially in the distressful pandemic period, it may be more difficult for the mothers to detect and report effortful control behaviors compared to negative emotionality behaviors since temperament as well as all other variables was evaluated based on mothers’ perception in the current study. Future studies using other measures such as observation as well as parent-reported measures on children’s emotion regulation would generate critical insights to understand differential roles of effortful control and negative emotionality on these associations.

Supporting the ‘spillover’ hypothesis (Erel & Burman, 1995), our findings underlined that marital conflict was associated with both maternal punitive ES behaviors and children’s behavioral problems. These results were in line with other findings indicating that high relationship stress negatively predicted parenting quality during the COVID-19 pandemic (Roos et al., 2021). Moreover, mothers’ psychological distress was also related to their evaluations on their children’s emotion regulation capacity and externalizing behaviors. These findings are consistent with the studies showing that maternal psychological distress is a predictor of both parenting behaviors (Wang et al., 2021) and child outcomes (Lionetti et al., 2022) on pandemic days. Specifically, parental non-supportive ES behaviors, especially distress and punitive reactions, were found to be significantly positively correlated with children’s maladaptation (Wang et al., 2021), and parental ES ability was also a significant moderator on the association between family stress and child internalizing symptoms during the COVID-19 period (Cohodes et al., 2021). Consequently, it may be asserted that while mothers are experiencing a very worrying life event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts with their spouses and their limited psychological resources may pose risk for their capacity to cope with their children’s emotions and may constitute risk factors for their children developing behavioral problems. Consequently, it may be suggested that intervention efforts taking into consideration that parents may be dealing with relational and psychological problems as well as may have limited understandings regarding how parental ES is important for their children’s development are imperative to support parenting capacity during stressful periods such as a massive health crisis and beyond.

Limitations and future directions

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study examining the moderating role of children’s temperament on the relationships between maternal ES behaviors and children’s behavioral difficulties in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though most studies conducted during the pandemic are carried out with the assumption that there is a one-way transfer from parent to child, our results highlighted that the child’s characteristics may also shape the associations between parenting influences and children’s maladjustment during this challenging experience. Despite its merits, the current study has some limitations. Most importantly, reliance on only mother-reported and cross-sectional data are important limitations of the current investigation and would be considered as increasing common method variance threat and limiting inferences about causality, respectively. Therefore, future studies with longitudinal designs that are conducted with multiple reporters using various methods would strengthen the reliability of our results and may extend our understanding of the interplay between environmental and child characteristics in predicting children’s adjustment. Additionally, this study is conducted with mothers but not fathers. Even though we started data collection by not excluding fathers, and in spite of our efforts to increase the number of participant fathers, the total number of fathers compared to mothers was very limited preventing them to be included in the final participant group. Since fathers are important socialization agents and children benefit more from an integrated family approach including the fathers as well, it may be crucial to find more effective ways to include fathers in both in-person and online studies. Finally, since we needed to limit the number of questions because of the chaotic living conditions brought by a challenging lockdown experience with their young children without external support, we were not able to investigate supportive ES behaviors as well as parents’ ability to cope with the stress which would be an important aspect of their psychological resources and may be linked with their ES behaviors. More comprehensive future studies are needed to understand parents’ reactions to the emotional expressions of their children who may struggle to cope with a difficult experience.

Conclusion

Our study showed that maternal non-supportive ES reactions pose risks for their children’s behavioral difficulties especially those who lack an emotion-regulation capacity. On the contrary, these non-supportive ES reactions may be especially beneficial for the children who are good at regulating themselves and may lead fewer externalizing behaviors of these children who were evaluated as easily soothed by their mothers. Additionally, our results highlighted that mother-reported interparental conflict and their own psychological distress may be risk factors related to their increased use of non-supportive ES reactions to their children’s emotional expressions and their children’s increased behavioral difficulties. As it was mentioned before, the COVID-19 lockdown is a large-scale disaster and non-normative life event that is an important source of stress for both parents and children. In disaster times, children may need extra parental guidance as they struggle to understand what is going on in their environment. However, it is harder for parents because they are trying to care for their children in an environment that is also unusually challenging for them. In addition to the chaotic, novel experience, the COVID-19 pandemic also obligated parents to put endless effort into keep their children away from the contagion by increasingly implementing hygiene-related precautions. Finally, our results highlighted that the same parental reactions to their children’s emotions may have different meanings and functions in non-Western societies such as Turkey than in Western societies, and it is crucial to create more representative measures to evaluate parental ES behaviors in non-Western cultures instead of directly adopting ones that were developed based on Western understanding of emotions by also considering children’s individual characteristics. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic has continued and, sadly may be followed by future major disasters, enlightening the factors that may contribute to parents’ and their children’s well-being and posing a risk for children’s developmental challenges is crucial to be able to identify the most vulnerable in future crises.