Author(s)

Emilie Jacobs, Stéphanie Mazzone, Poline Simon, Nathalie Nader-Grosbois

Psychological Sciences Research Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

This paper investigates how parents of children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) socialize emotions, and how these behaviors affect their children’s social adjustment. The goals were: 1) to identify the emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) used by parents of children with IDs, in comparison to parents of typically developing (TD) children, and 2) to examine the extent to which these reactions and conversations affect children’s social competences and (mal)adjustment. Parents’ reactions to emotions have been described as either supportive or unsupportive of children’s socio-Emotional development, and their conversations about emotions with their children have also been considered as helpful in this respect. However, little is known about these reactions and conservations in either mothers or fathers of children with IDs. The first study compared these ERSBs in 54 mothers and 32 fathers of children of preschool developmental age with or without IDs. The results showed that parents of children with IDs use more unsupportive reactions to their emotions. The second study investigated the links between parents’ reactions and conversations, and their children’s profiles (IDs, developmental age, social adjustment and externalizing or internalizing problems). Correlational and regression analyses emphasized specific links between some maternal or paternal reactions and conversations on the one hand and children’s characteristics, social adjustment or behavior problems on the other hand.

Parental Emotion-Related Socialization Behaviors, Emotion-Related Conversations, Intellectual Disabilities, Social Adjustment, Behavioral Problems

Jacobs, E. , Mazzone, S. , Simon, P. and Nader-Grosbois, N. (2019) The Unforeseen Influence of Parents’ Socialization Behaviors on the Social Adjustment of Children with Intellectual Disabilities. Psychology, 10, 1275-1301. doi: 10.4236/psych.2019.109083.