Emotion regulation skills in early childhood in terms of family systems: Parental abuse awareness, marital adjustment, sibling relationships and general family adjustment

In this study, the predictive effect of family and family subsystems with various interactions on children's emotion regulation skills was investigated. The variables whose relationships with the emotion regulation skills of the child were examined, were selected by considering interactions that might be at risk of abuse or neglect in the case of binary systems. In this respect, parents' awareness of abuse representing the parent-child subsystem, marital adjustment representing the mother-father subsystem, positive sibling relationships representing the sibling-sibling subsystem, and family adjustment representing the general family system were examined. In this context, a model that points to the mediating role of family adjustment in the relationships between parents' awareness of abuse towards their children, marital adjustment among parents and the quality of the relationship between siblings and the child's emotion regulation skills was tested. The sample of the study consists of 120 parents whose ages are between 22-49. Personal Information Form, Emotion Regulation Scale, Abuse Awareness Scale - Parent Form, Schaeffer Sibling Behavior Evaluation Scale, Short Form of Family Adjustment Scale, Marital Adjustment Scale and COVID-19 Pandemic Anxiety Scale were used as data collection tools in the study. Since the internal consistency coefficient of the scale used to evaluate the parent subsystem was not acceptable, this subsystem was excluded from the model. The model created in line with the research hypotheses was tested through the AMOS Program. The analysis results indicate that the hypothesis model is partially compatible with the data. In the model, in which the mediating role of family adjustment in the relationship between the marital adjustment of the parents and the quality of sibling relationships and the emotional regulation/control levels of the child aged 2-6, and the levels of lability/negativity of their emotions, there is no direct relationship between family adjustment and the level of the child's emotions lability/negativity, however, it was found that its effect on emotion regulation/control was significant. This study, which aims to consider the family as a system on emotion regulation skills in early childhood, shows that it is important to consider the family in a holistic way when working with children's emotion regulation skills. Keywords: emotion regulation, family systems, abuse awareness, marital adjustment, positive sibling relationships