A Study On The Relationship Between Parent-child Attachment And Emotion Regulation Ability In 3-4 Year Old Childre

Parent-child attachment refers to the stable and lasting emotional connection established between children and their main caregivers(parents)in the process of interaction,which is the most important social relationship in early childhood and lays the foundation for children’s emotional regulation ability.3-6 years old is a key period for the development of children’s emotional regulation ability,among which the development of emotional regulation strategies in3-4-year-old children is obvious.Previous research on the relationship between parent-child attachment and children’s emotional regulation ability has mostly focused on the attention of mother-child attachment,and ignored the impact of father-child attachment.Therefore,this paper analyzes the level of parent-child attachment in 3-4-year-old children from the aspects of motherchild attachment and father-child attachment,and deeply discusses its relationship with children’s emotional regulation ability.In this study,224 3-4-year-old toddlers and their parents from three kindergartens in Anyang City were selected as the study sample using questionnaire survey method.The parent-child attachment level and emotion regulation ability of the toddlers were measured separately using the Attachment Questionnaire for Toddlers developed by Pei-Pei Hong and the Emotion Regulation Checklist revised by Jing-Jing Zhu et al.and the relationship existing between them was further analyzed.The results of the study found that(1)the overall level of parent-child attachment of 3-4 year old children was good.In mother-child attachment,the dimensions of attachment-exploration and social activeness differed significantly across child types,with only and second-child and older children scoring higher on the attachment-exploration dimension and only children scoring higher on the social activeness dimension compared to first-child children.Significant differences were found on the interaction fluency and social activeness dimensions for primary caregivers,with toddlers whose primary caregivers were parents scoring higher on both dimensions.Father-child attachment was not affected by gender and child type.(2)The overall level of emotion regulation ability of 3-4 year olds was better.There were significant differences in the emotion regulation dimension in terms of parents’ education level and primary caregiver,and children whose parents had college education or above and whose primary caregiver was a parent had higher scores in emotion regulation.In addition,there were significant differences in the emotional instability dimension in terms of parental education and child type,with higher scores of emotional instability among children whose parents had secondary school education or less,and children with one and two children or more.(3)The dimensions of parent-child attachment were significantly positively correlated with the emotion regulation dimension of the Emotion Regulation Checklist and negatively correlated with the emotion instability dimension in 3-4 year olds.(4)Parent-child attachment was a significant positive predictor of children’s total emotion regulation scores and a significant negative predictor of children’s total emotion instability scores.In view of the above findings,this study proposes educational suggestions for improving parent-child attachment and developing toddlers’ emotion regulation ability from two perspectives: family education and kindergarten education.