COVID-19 salgını döneminde ebeveynler arası ilişki niteliği ve ebeveyn duygu düzenlemesinin çocuğun duygu düzenlemesi üzerindeki rolünün incelenmesi

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a stressful situation with a variety of repercussions on family systems such as economic changes, fear of disease, or social isolation. In a time when so many various stressful events arise, it is crucial to investigate how parents and children regulate their emotions since it might be more challenging for parents and children to manage tough emotions like stress and anxiety during this time. In the family, each part dependent on each other as systems as well as they are independent. In this regard, the interparental relationship is just as crucial to children's ability to control emotions as their parents. Due to the potential for both dependent and independent influences on each member of the family, it is critical to study emotion regulation during COVID-19 within the family systems of the parents, children, and interparental relationship. The aim of the current study is to investigate the relationship among parent emotion regulation, interparental relationship quality, and child emotion regulation in the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, this study attempted to examine the indirect role of maternal emotion regulation in the association between interparental relationship quality and the emotion regulation of children. Also, child age, child gender and family SES were used as control variables. The data was obtained from mothers. The sample consisted of 204 mothers who have 2- to -6 years old children (M: 3.84, SD: 1.34; 55.2% boys, 44.8% girls). The data collection tools were as follows: the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier, 1976), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003), the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields & Cicchetti, 1999), and the COVID-19 Perceived Stress Scale (Acar et al., 2020). Two separate hierarchical regression analyses were conducted for child emotion regulation and child lability. Results showed that mothers' expressive suppression and interparental relationship consensus predicted the child lability. Also, emotion regulation was predicted by mothers' expressive suppression, but none of the interparental relationship quality dimensions. Moreover, the mediation analysis revealed that of interparental relationship quality did not predict child emotion regulation through maternal emotion regulation. This study highlights the importance of the influences of interparental relationship and mothers' emotion regulation on the child's emotion regulation.