...Frick, Frame, Hynd, 1988). In interactions with their friends, CP boys issue more commands, and are more noxious and less socially skilled than non-CP boys (Dishion, Andrews, & Crosby, 1995). There is also evidence that CP children lack key social-cognitive skills that are central to healthy peer relations. Conduct-problem children inaccurately interpret peers' intentions (Dodge, Murphy, & Buchsbaum, 1984), presume hostile intent (Dodge & Frame, 1982), fail to attend to relevant social cues (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990), and generate more negative solutions to hypothetical dilemmas involving peer conflict (Rubin & Clark, 1983; Rubin, Moller, & Emptage, 1987).

One explanation for why CP children have difficulty managing peer relations is that they have deficits in the area of emotional understanding, expression, and regulation (Hubbard & Dearing, in press). With respect to emotional understanding, 3- to 6-year-old children with conduct problems and difficult temperaments had more trouble correctly matching emotions to social cues than did a matched sample of normal children (Hughes, Dunn, & White, 1998). Difficulties in the area of emotional expression have also been reported. Third-, fifth-, and seventh-grade aggressive children were more likely to report feeling angry or sad than nonaggressive children when shown anger-provoking video vignettes (Underwood, Coie, & Herbsman, 1992), less likely to provide appropriate examples of their own emotional experiences (Cook, Greenberg, & Kusche, 1994), and more likely to provide lower quality responses to situational cues used to recognize feelings in themselves (Cook et al., 1994).

Finally, CP children may experience more emotional intensity than their peers making it difficult for them to regulate emotion (Hubbard & Dearing, in press). For example, Melnick and Hinshaw (2000) found that highly aggressive ADHD boys showed a less constructive pattern of emotional coping than low aggressive ADHD or nondiagnosed boys in an emotionally stimulating family task. Boys' tendency to focus on negative aspects of the situation and vent emotionally were predictive of noncompliance and aggression.

If CP children's difficulties with peers are associated with problems in emotional expression and regulation, then a better understanding of the contextual processes that support emotional competence may help CP children who struggle with peer relations. The family is one of the main socialization contexts of emotional expression and regulation among normative samples (Denham & Almeida, 1987; Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). Poor parent socialization of emotion in families with CP children may leave children struggling to maintain positive and repair negative interactions with peers. In the present paper, we examine how parents' socialization of emotion is related to peer relations in a CP sample.

The way in which parents teach children about emotion is an important aspect of parenting within normative samples. Theoretical discussions of factors relating to children's emotion regulation skills support the idea that children learn how to regulate emotion within the course of parent-child interactions (Cole & Kaslow, 1988; Eisenberg et al., 1996; Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996; Parke & Buriel, 1998; Thompson, 1990, 1991). Parent-child interactions may reflect an ongoing process of teaching children how to maintain, alter and modulate their emotional experiences and expression. Such teaching may occur through modeling of affective expression and regulation, direct coaching in how to recognize and cope with emotion and the situations that give rise to them, and/or reinforcement of emotional displays.

Parental awareness and coaching of emotion has been central to work by Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1997), who found that parents have an organized set of feelings and thoughts about their own emotions and their children's emotions called "parental meta-emotion philosophy (PMEP)." Patterns in PMEP data indicated that some parents have a meta-emotion philosophy that is high in awareness and coaching of emotion. These parents are aware of low intensity emotions in themselves and in their children, view the child's negative emotion as an opportunity for intimacy or teaching, validate and label their child's emotion, and problem-solve with the child by discussing goals and strategies for dealing with the situation that led to the emotion. Other parents have a meta-emotion philosophy that is low in awareness and coaching of emotion. These parents deny or ignore emotion, view their job as needing to change these toxic negative emotions as quickly as possible, convey to their children that emotions are not very important, and hope that the dismissing strategy will make the emotion go away quickly.

Parental meta-emotion philosophy has broad implications for the emotional well being of all family members and family subsystems (Gottman et al., 1996). In families with typically developing children, parents who are emotion coaching showed less hostility in their marital relationship, were more happily married, and their marriage was less likely to end in divorce. They were also less rejecting and more scaffolding/praising in the parent-child relationship. Children whose parents were more coaching of emotion showed less evidence of physiological stress, greater physiological regulatory abilities, greater ability to focus attention, less physical illness, and higher academic achievement. Specific to peer relations, parents who adopted an emotion coaching perspective had children who displayed less negative interactions with their peers while parents who were dismissing of emotion (low in awareness and coaching) had children who displayed more negative interactions with peers (Gottman et al., 1996).

However, little is known about how parents of CP children socialize them around the appropriate expression and regulation of emotion, and what effect such parental emotion socialization may have on the quality of CP children's peer relations. If parents of CP children are less skilled than parents of non-CP children in their own awareness of emotion, or their ability to coach their children's emotions, this may help explain why CP children have difficulty with emotional understanding, expression and regulation, and why they have trouble with peers.

Greater attention to emotional behavior in families with CP children may also guide the development of new intervention strategies to help families with CP children. The most successful treatment approach for conduct problems in young children has been parent-training programs (Brestan & Eyberg, 1998). Among those programs for families with CP children has been a predominant focus on the importance of gaining control of behavior through cognitive behavioral approaches (McMahon, 1999; Webster-Stratton & Taylor, 2001). Intervention efforts have not, however, focused on training parents how to respond to their CP child's emotions or what parents can teach their children about emotion regulation and expression. This is especially surprising, given that one of the chief complaints from parents of CP children has to do with their children's difficulty managing emotion. If parents of CP children have difficulty in the area of emotional awareness and coaching, understanding parents' meta-emotion philosophy may guide the development of intervention programs specifically targeted at improving parental awareness and coaching of emotion.

In this paper, we examined parental meta-emotion philosophy in a sample of families with CP children. Two major questions were addressed. First, we assessed whether mothers of CP children differed in their awareness or coaching of emotion from mothers of non-CP children. We hypothesized that if CP children have difficulty in the area of emotional understanding and regulation, it may be that their mothers are less aware and less coaching of emotion. Second, we examined whether greater awareness and coaching of emotion is associated with better peer relations in families with highly aggressive children. Since previous research using a more normative sample suggested that awareness and coaching of emotion was associated with better peer relations (Gottman et al., 1997), we wondered whether peer relations in CP children would also benefit from having parents who are aware and coaching of emotion.

To address this latter question, we examined whether child aggression moderated the relation between parental meta-emotion philosophy and children's peer relations. Several patterns of results may be possible. If mother's awareness and coaching does not show beneficial relations with peer play in CP children but does show beneficial effects for non-CP children, then we would expect a significant interaction between parental meta-emotion philosophy and child aggression, with a...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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