The effects of emotion regulation psycho-educational programs for primary grade children and their mothers on children's emotion regulation skills

This study aimed to examine the effects of psychoeducation programs for primary school children and their mothers on children's emotion regulation skills. With this aim, a psychoeducation program on emotional regulation skills was applied to children, and its influences on their emotion regulation skills were investigated. Besides, it was evaluated whether simultaneous training on emotion coaching for the mothers make a difference in children's emotion regulation skills. Additionally, the effects of the emotion coaching psychoeducation program on mothers' emotional socialization behaviors were examined. The study sample consisted of 16 mothers and 24 4th grade primary school children in the Altındağ district of Ankara province. Two experimental and one control group were defined in which data on emotion regulation skills were collected. Among these groups, there were eight children in the "mother-child education group" where both the child and the mother received the psychoeducation program; eight children in the "child education group" where only the child received the program, and eight children in the "control group" where neither the child nor mother received the psychoeducation program. A ten-session "Psychoeducation Program for Emotion Regulation Skills" was applied to the mother-child education group and the child education group, while no experimental procedure was applied to the control group. Besides, eight mothers whose children were in the experimental group also participated in a six-session "Emotion Coaching Psychoeducation Program." Eight mothers whose children did not receive education were included in the control group, and no experimental procedure was performed for those mothers. The research had a quasi-experimental research design in which the pretest-posttest control group experimental model was used. The quantitative data of the study were obtained through the "Emotion Regulation Checklist" developed by Shields and Cicchetti (1997) and the "Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale" developed by Fabes, Eisenberg, and Bernzweig (1990). Emotion Regulation Checklist was applied to both mothers and teachers to measure their emotion regulation skills. Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale was completed by mothers to measure mothers' emotional socialization behaviors. The data related to pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test measurements were collected using the scales. In the study, the pre-test and post-test data collected from mother-child education, child education, and control groups with Emotion Regulation Checklist and Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney-U test. The Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test was used to determine the permanence of the data collected from the mother-child education and child education groups. The study's qualitative data were collected through a focus group interview with the mothers in the experimental group through a semi-structured interview form developed by the researcher. The content analysis method was applied to the analysis of qualitative data. According to the study's quantitative findings, the children's emotion regulation skills in the mother-child education experimental group, where the children and their mothers received the psychoeducation program, increased significantly and permanently. According to teacher measurements, no significant difference was found between the students in the experimental and control group due to the psychoeducation program. According to the mothers' and teachers' measurements, there was no significant change in the children's emotion regulation skills in the experimental group, where only the children received the psychoeducation program. When the mother-child education group and the child education group were compared, it was revealed that there was a significant difference in the children's emotion regulation skills by mother measurements, and this difference was in favor of the mother-child education group. There was no significant difference between mother-child education and child education groups' emotion regulation skills by teacher measurements. It was found that the negative reaction subscale scores of the mothers in the experimental group who received the Emotional Coaching Psychoeducation Program decreased significantly compared to the scores of the mothers in the control group, and it was permanent. It was found that the scores of the mothers in the experimental group obtained from the positive reaction subscale of Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale significantly increased compared to the scores of the mothers in the control group, and it was permanent. It can be suggested that the emotion coaching psychoeducation program increased positive emotion socialization behaviors, decreased negative emotion socialization behaviors, and these changes were permanent. When the qualitative findings obtained from the focus group interview with the mothers were examined, it was found that the mothers achieved effective communication, emotion regulation, and problem-solving gains from the education they received, the unpleasant feelings replaced with pleasant feelings after the education, and the sessions were beneficial for themselves and their children. Besides, it was revealed an increase in emotion regulation, self-expression, communication skills, social skills, and problem-solving skills. As a result of these findings, the child and the mother's education increased their emotion regulation skills, self-expression, communication skills, social skills, and problem-solving skills. The findings were discussed in light of the data in the literature. Keywords: Emotion regulation skills, emotion socialization