Mapping Emotional Components in Daily Parent-Child Interactions: A Multilevel Psychological Network Approach

Daily parent-child interactions are emotionally rich and offer valuable insights into emotional processing and parenting functioning. To examine how key emotional components interact within and across individuals in everyday contexts, we combined an experience sampling method with a multilevel psychological network approach, grounded in several prominent emotion and parenting theories. The emotional components we examined were (a) parents’ own emotions, (b) their perceptions of their children’s emotions, and (c) their use of self- and child-focused reappraisal and rumination strategies. Data were collected from 121 U.S. parents (Mage = 43.18 years, SD = 8.54) over 28 days, preceded by a presurvey. Three psychological networks emerged, each offering distinct yet complementary insights. The within-person temporal network uncovered reciprocal spillover effects between self- and child-focused emotion regulation, with parents’ own emotions driving fluctuations in both. The contemporaneous network revealed that parents polyregulated emotions using congruent self- and child-focused strategies within a single interaction. The between-person network revealed that emotional patterns differed between genders and were related to dispositional emotional reactivity. For this work, we adopted an integrative approach to unpacking parental emotional processing by incorporating both self-focused and child-focused emotion systems. Our findings underscore the importance of helping parents navigate parallel emotional processes to support both their own well-being and their children’s emotional development.