Direct and indirect associations among mothers’ invalidating childhood environment, emotion regulation difficulties, and parental apology

BACKGROUND: Effective emotion regulation abilities are essential for engaging in positive, validating parenting practices. Yet, many parents report difficulties with both emotion regulation and positive parenting, and these difficulties may in part be the result of parents’ own childhood experiences of invalidation. Building upon prior literature documenting the intergenerational transmission of invalidation and emotion dysregulation, the present study examined the associations between these constructs and a specific parenting practice – parental apology – that can be conceptualized as a type of validating parenting practice. METHODS: Using a sample of 186 community mothers, we tested direct and indirect relationships via correlational and path analysis between participants’ retrospective reports of parental invalidation during childhood, difficulties with emotion regulation, and two aspects of parental apology – proclivity (i.e., participants’ self-reported propensity to apologize to their child) and effectiveness (i.e., participants’ inclusion of specific apology content when prompted to write a child-directed apology). Parental invalidation, difficulties with emotion regulation, and parental apology proclivity were measured via self-report questionnaires. Apology effectiveness was measured by coding written responses to a hypothetical vignette. RESULTS: There was a significant negative bivariate relationship between difficulties with emotion regulation and parental apology proclivity and effectiveness. Parents’ own childhood experiences of invalidation were linked to parental apology indirectly via emotion regulation difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that mothers with greater difficulties regulating emotions may be less able to or have a lower proclivity to apologize to their child when appropriate. Thus, parent apology may be an important addition to current calls for parent validation training. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40479-022-00191-z.