Good Education Better Parenting: A Study on Role of Parental Education in Parent-Child Emotional Communication

Abstract

A child’s capability to comprehend and manage emotions is a by-product of the emotional bonding between him and his parents. Initially a child requires help with developing emotional awareness and understanding. As the child develops so does their knowledge about the world and other people. This is where the child needs help with emotional expression and emotional regulation. Emotion regulation will then lead to reflective functioning or mentalization. This whole process is necessary for a child to develop a strong emotional backbone and is only possible when there is good parent-child emotional communication. One of the components of good emotional communication in parents is their educational background. We hypothesize that the higher the educational back ground, better the quality of emotional communication between parent and child. A 75 item questionnaire (one for child and a separate questionnaire for father and mother) was developed to measure five dimensions of emotional communication: emotional awareness, emotion regulation, emotional understanding, emotion expression and reflective functioning. The results indicated that for all the participants father, mother, child for father and child for mother showed significant impact of parents educational level over emotional communication.