How parents assist children’s emotion regulation in Turkey: The Turkish adaptation of the parental assistance with child emotion regulation (PACER) questionnaire

Parents play a critical role in emotional socialization and the development of emotion regulation during childhood. The tools to measure how parents assist children’s emotion regulation are very limited. The Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire is a novel scale developed for this purpose with excellent psychometric properties. The aim of this study is to adapt the PACER to Turkish and investigate its psychometric properties in the Turkish cultural setting. The data were collected from 700 parents who have children aged birth to 17 years. In addition to the PACER, participants filled out some scales about their own beliefs and behaviors, also their children’s psychological symptoms. We confirmed the original ten-factor structures of the PACER in a Turkish sample and the measurement invariance supported the PACER’s structure across subgroups. The high internal consistencies of factors were achieved; however, the test-retest reliability was lower than expected. The factors of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., rumination, expressive suppression, avoidance) were positively associated with parents’ own emotion regulation deficit, symptoms, and child’s symptoms, while others (e.g., reappraisal, problem-solving) were negatively associated with them. Overall, our results suggest that the Turkish version of the PACER is a psychometrically valid and reliable measurement to assess how parents support their children to regulate their emotions. We believe that this adaptation allows the scale to be used in developmental and clinical psychology studies and will pave the way for cross-cultural studies.