Abstract: As an important component of child adjustment, child emotion regulation has received increasing attention. It is widely recognized that parental harsh discipline strongly influences the growth of child emotion regulation. However, the direction of influence is not necessarily unidirectional, child emotion regulation can also exert influences on parental harsh discipline, and the associations may change over time. Thus, the present study attempts to explore dynamic reciprocal associations between parental harsh discipline and child emotion regulation. Given that the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) fails to separate between-person variance from within-person variance, we used random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to explore the reciprocal associations between parental harsh discipline and child emotion regulation.
The longitudinal sample consisted of 560 father-mother dyads and their children (56.79% boys, 43.21% girls) in Jinan, China. At T1, the average ages of the children, fathers, and mothers were 9.41 years (SD = 1.00), 37.13 years (SD = 5.04), and 36.14 years (SD = 4.72), respectively. During four times points, parents and children respectively reported parents’ harsh discipline using the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale (CTSPC). Children reported their emotion regulation using the Children’s Emotion Management Scale (CEMS). SPSS was used to conduct reliability, common method bias tests, and to calculate descriptive statistics. Mplus was used to test longitudinal measurement invariance and conduct RI-CLPMs to test dynamic reciprocal associations between parental harsh discipline and child emotion regulation.
The results indicated that all measurements showed good reliability, and there is no serious common method bias, and the results of the longitudinal measurement invariance indicated that changes in all variables over time were reliable. Moreover, the results of the RI-CLPMs showed that at the between-person level, the random intercepts of paternal harsh discipline were significantly positively with the random intercepts of child emotion dysregulation (including anger, sadness and anxiety) and negatively with the random intercept of sadness coping; the random intercepts of maternal harsh discipline were significantly positively with the random intercepts of child emotion dysregulation (including anger, sadness and anxiety) and negatively with the random intercepts of emotion coping (including anger, sadness and anxiety) and anxiety inhibition. In addition, the random intercepts of paternal harsh discipline and maternal harsh discipline were significantly positively correlated. At the within-person level, the within-person changes in maternal harsh discipline significantly negatively predicted the within-person changes in child anger dysregulation at the subsequent time point; the within-person changes in child anger inhibition at T2 significantly negatively predicted the within-person changes in maternal harsh discipline at T3; maternal harsh discipline and child anger coping were reciprocally negatively predicted at the within-person level between T2 and T3.
In sum, the associations between parental harsh discipline and child emotion regulation were found to be different for parent’s roles, child emotion types, and regulation methods. These observations expand the understanding of the complex associations between parental harsh discipline and child emotion regulation, having important implications for intervention and improvement of child mental health and parental parenting. In addition, the results differences highlight the importance of distinguishing between-person and within-person levels.

Key words: parental harsh discipline, child emotion regulation, dynamic reciprocal associations, between-person, within-person