The relationship between parents' emotion socialization skills and emotional regulation and social competence of preschool children

One of the aims of this study is to examine the emotion regulation and social competence skills of preschool children according to some personal and demographic characteristics of children and their parents, and secondly to determine the relationship between parents' emotion socialization skills and children's emotion regulation and social competence skills. The participants of the study consisted of class teachers of 102 children between the ages of 5 and 6 who were attending preschool education and parents of 52 children among them. As data collection tools; 'Emotion Regulation Scale', 'Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation Scale-30', 'Coping with Negative Emotions of Children Scale' and 'Personal Information Form' were used. In the analysis of the research data, Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H test was used for intergroup comparisons according to the personal and demographic characteristics of children and their parents, and Spearman correlation test was used to examine the relationship between parents' emotion socialization skills and children's emotion regulation and social competence skills. In the research, in terms of social competence; it was found that there are significant differences in favor of children who are girls, children without siblings, who frequently meet with other children outside the school, care of family elders during infancy, whose parents are older than 35 years, whose mother is university graduate and who often spend time with their parents. Anger / aggression, which is another dimension of social competence; it was found to be higher in boys, children who had pre-school education for 1 year and 3 years and had problematic / troubled infancy. On the other hand, it was concluded that emotion regulation did not generally differ according to some characteristics of the children, and there were significant differences in favor of male children, parents who had medium time and problematic/troubled infancy in the dimension of variability/negativity which is a dimension of emotion regulation only. Anxiety/introversion, which is a dimension of emotion regulation, was found to be higher in children whose fathers were university graduates. Emotion regulation and social competence skills in children; It was found that there was no difference according to the age of the children, the presence of an older sibling, the income level perceived by the parent and the frequency of the parent to follow publications and trainings on child development. In addition, a low positive relationship was found between parents' problem-focused responses of emotional socialization skills and children's emotion regulation skills. The results of the research were discussed with the other findings in the literature.The findings were weighed together with the relevant studies in the literature. Key Words: Emotional Regulation, Social Competence, Emotion Socialization, Preschool Children