The effects of emotion regulation and child gender on depressed parents\u27 responses to children\u27s sadness

Parent depressive symptoms have been linked to the way that parents emotionally socialize their children, yet there hasn\u27t been much research looking into the factors that explain this relationship. The purpose of the current study was to explore this gap in the literature by proposing a moderated mediation model. It was hypothesized that parent emotion regulation, specifically parent use of suppression, would mediate the relationship between parent depressive symptoms and their responses to their children\u27s displays of sadness. It was also predicted that child gender would moderate the strength of the mediator\u27s effect on parent responses. Moderated mediation models were tested for six different response types (distress, punitive, minimization, emotional encouragement, problem-focused and emotion-focused) using the PROCESS macro by Andrew Hayes. Results found that use of suppression was a significant mediator for five of the six models, and child gender did not have any effect on the strength of the mediation. These findings extend current knowledge of the effect of depression on emotion-related parenting practices, and future research is needed to see how these results fit into the intergenerational transmission of depression and other internalizing disorders