Exploring the Roles of Parent Emotional Styles and Children’s Coping Skills in the Emotional and Behavioral Sequelae of Community Violence Exposure

Exposure to violence during childhood can lead to a variety of adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are influenced by child-, family-, and community-level characteristics. This study explored the relations between violence exposure, parent emotional styles, children’s coping, and children’s emotional and behavioral outcomes. Data was collected electronically during the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Parents of 46 school age children (61% male, ages 5-12) from New York City participated in the study. Given the small sample size, effect sizes of correlations and multiple regressions were interpreted in addition to significance levels. Higher exposure to violence was not significantly associated with child emotion/behavior symptoms, child coping, or parent emotional styles. Higher child coping was significantly associated with lower child anxious/depressed and aggressive behavior problems. Associations between parent emotional styles and children’s coping and behavior problems were counterintuitive but perhaps reflective of parent bias in report of child experiences. For instance, higher emotionally responsive parenting attitudes were not significantly associated with child coping or child emotion/behavior outcomes. In contrast, higher emotionally dismissive parenting attitudes were significantly associated with higher child coping and lower child anxious/depressed and aggressive symptoms. There were no significant interaction effects for child coping or parent emotional styles as moderators of the association between violence exposure and child outcomes. Findings and implications for future research are discussed