Mothers Beliefs and Reactions Toward their Children Negative Emotions

Parents are the primary socializing agents contributing to the development of children’s emotional competence and the way parents respond to children’s emotional displays is one important socialization practice. Aim of the Study: To identify mother’s beliefs and reactions toward children’s negative emotions. Research Design: A Descriptive research design was applied to suit with the nature of the present study. Research Setting: This study was conducted at four governmental primary schools located at different district in Eastern Provenience, Saudi Arabian. Two boys and two girls’ governmental schools were randomly chosen for the study. Subjects: One hundred and fifteen mothers that have at least one child enrolled at the previous mentioned primary school between 6 and 12 years of age have participated in the study. Tools: Three tools were used in this study namely: Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale to measure the degrees to which parents perceive themselves as reactive to their children’s negative affect in distressful situations, Social Competence Scale-Parent to assess parents’ perceptions of positive social behaviors and Parents’ Beliefs about Children Emotion. Results: According to the study, Mothers who believe that their role is to guide children’s emotion experience reported more emotion-focused and problem-focused reactions than parents who believe that children naturally learn how to deal with emotional experiences. Mother believes negative emotions are good, then that mother is likely to allow a child to process and deal with any negative emotion rather than try to stop it. Thus, children will learn that emotions are okay and can be worked out, supporting beliefs about malleability, parent believes emotions are bad, then that parent is likely to respond to a child’s emotion expression in ways that lead the child to believe that jealousy in a relationship is an indication of a bad relationship and likely, one that is not worth the effort to change it.