The role of parenting styles on temperament characteristics and emotion regulation skills of children

AIM: The aim of present research is to examine the effect of the parenting style on the emotion regulation ability and temperament traits of preschool children. METHOD: The study was conducted with 102 (47 females, 55 males) 4-5 years-old students who are studying in preschool and kindergartens approved by the T. R. Ministry of Education. To collect data, the researcher used ''Socio-Demographic Information and Data Form'' to be informed about the demographic characteristics of the family, ''Parental Attitude Scale'' to measure parenting style, ''Emotion Regulation Checklist-Parent and Teacher Forms (ERC)'' to measure the emotion regulation ability of children, and ''The Short Temperament Scale for Children-Parent Form (STSC)'' to measure the temperament traits of children. A simple linear regression analysis was conducted to examine the effect of parenting style on the children's emotion regulation ability and the temperament traits. RESULTS: Democratic and authoritarian parenting style predicted the subscale of children's lability/negativity (respectively r2=.21, β=.24, p<.05; r2=.21, β=.41, p<.05), besides it was found a strong correlation between the democratic parenting style and children's emotion regulation (r2=.22, β=.44, p<.05). It was found that the democratic parenting style was a significant for approach temperament of children (r2=.11, β=.28, p<.05). No other significant relationship was found. CONCLUSION: The research results demonstrated that democratic parenting style of parents has a positive effect on childrens' emotion regulation skills. These results suggested to be a flexible manner toward his/her developmental features and to keep the skill of limiting in a certain level. Key words: Parenting Style, Temperament, Emotion Regulation, Social-Emotional Development, Preschool Period.