Project Summary:
Effective parenting is a critical contributor to child development, and it depends in part on parents’ own ability to
manage competing priorities, responding to their own goals and emotions while meeting their child’s needs.
Negotiating this balance requires effective emotion regulation (ER), a transdiagnostic factor that predicts a host
of mental health and social domains of functioning for adults, including parenting. Parental ER difficulties
undermine effective discipline and emotionally responsive interactions with children, and subsequently predict
children’s own emotion dysregulation and related developmental outcomes. Accordingly, parenting interventions
are increasingly targeting parent ER as a mechanism to improve treatment outcomes, but these efforts require
valid and specific measurement of ER in the parenting context. Presently, the measurement of ER among
parents is limited to general adult self-report measures that do not have specific applicability to ER demands in
the parenting context. The goal of this project is to refine and validate a novel, brief self-report measure of parent
ER, the Regulating Emotions in Parenting Scale (REPS). This proposed project innovates the measurement of
parental ER by focusing specifically on situations in which parents regulate their emotions during interactions
with their children. Building on promising preliminary data, we will first employ focus interviews to refine item
content, then collect data from a diverse national sample (N = 1500) of parents with children ages 6 to 16. Aim
1 is to establish REPS factor structure and measurement invariance by race/ethnicity and gender. Aim 2 will
establish construct validity by testing correlations with related constructs. We will then explore an extension of
the REPS to include both self and co-parent reports in a dyadic sample comprising marital/partnered and
intergenerational co-parents. We will use this data to explore partner-report methods, in comparison to self-
reports, as predictors of parenting behavior and other outcomes, such as co-parenting alliance. This R21 will
contribute to both developmental and intervention research by creating a psychometrically robust measure of
parent ER, which is an important predictor of parenting behavior and child outcomes that can exacerbate or
buffer risk for maladaptation. In addition to developmental research, we anticipate that this measure can also be
used for clinical screening and treatment outcome measurement in intervention and prevention efforts targeting
parents and children. This proposed project is consistent with the R21 mechanism, by developing a novel
measure and methodology that could have a major impact on parenting research and ultimately support the
health and well-being of children.