ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Social and Emotional Development
This article is part of the Research TopicFamily Storytelling: Discourse and Narratives as Developmental Processes and Methodological Tools Across the Life SpanView all articles
Mothers' Observed Reminiscing Style and Children's Emotion Regulation: An Examination of Cross-Lagged Effects
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
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How mothers talk about emotional memories relates to their children's socioemotional development. However, there is a limited understanding of how this reminiscing relates to children's emotion regulation. Similarly, we know little about whether children's emotion regulation shapes how mothers reminisce. Therefore, in this study we examined the cross-lagged relations between mothers' observed reminiscing style (autonomy support, elaboration, and positive and negative evaluation) and children's emotion regulation. Twice, mother and child (Mage = 4.02 years, SD = 0.85, 47.2% female) pairs reminisced about a positive and a negative memory (T1, n = 89; T2, n = 63) - with 7 months apart. Additionally, at both timepoints, mothers completed a questionnaire assessing their child's emotion regulation skills. Through structural equation modeling, we found that during negative memory conversations, mothers positively evaluating their child's contributions was related to more adaptive emotion regulation in children across time. Regarding the opposite direction of influence, children's high emotional lability negatively related to mothers' autonomy support 7 months later, especially in the context of positive memories. There were no cross-lagged relations between mothers' elaboration or negative evaluation of children's contributions and child emotion regulation. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that parent-child reminiscing and children's emotion regulation mutually influence each other.
Keywords: Cross-lagged analysis, Emotion Regulation, Emotional Lability, Family discourse, Reminiscing
Received: 05 Nov 2025; Accepted: 17 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Çetin, Steinsbekk and Van der Kaap-Deeder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Deniz Çetin
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