A pilot study of an emotion coaching and mindfulness program for parents of early adolescents

This pilot study examined the effectiveness of the Emotion Coaching Parenting Intervention, a seven-session parenting intervention designed to help parents of young adolescents better manage their own and their children's emotions in the context of parenting. Supported by the literature showing the powerful impact of parents' emotion socialization on adolescent outcomes, this intervention teaches parents positive emotion socialization practices, the principles of an emotion coaching parenting style, and mindfulness techniques, and educates parents about adolescent emotional development. This pilot study employed a pre-post design with parents from four parenting classes (n = 23) and measured participants' parenting stress, parenting efficacy, parenting satisfaction, emotion coaching parenting style, emotional well-being, knowledge of adolescent emotional development, and their children's anxious/depressed and aggressive behaviors. This study also examined the effects of parents' emotional expressiveness and emotion socialization in their families of origin on parents' improvements. Results of this study demonstrate that parents who participated in the intervention showed decreased use of emotion dismissing parenting behaviors, decreased negative emotional experience and parenting stress, and increased knowledge of adolescent development over the course of the intervention. Children of participating parents engaged in fewer anxious/depressed and aggressive behaviors by the end of the intervention. Parents who attended more sessions had greater increases in emotion coaching behaviors, and increased emotion coaching was linked with increased parental positive emotions, as well as reduced parenting stress and child aggressive behavior. Reduced emotion dismissing was associated with increased parenting satisfaction. Parents' increased emotion coaching behaviors and improved emotional well-being predicted decreases in their adolescents' aggressive behaviors. Analyses also demonstrated that parents who had the greatest difficulties in emotional expressivity and reported more negative emotion socialization in their family of origin benefited most from this intervention. Overall, parents reported that they were quite satisfied with the intervention. This study provides strong support for the effectiveness of the Emotion Coaching Parenting Intervention for both parent and child outcomes and lays an effective foundation for future development and study of this intervention.