Parenting with a smile: Display rules, regulatory effort, and parental burnout
(2021) Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences — Location: In virtual (27.May.2021)
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- Authors
Lin, Gao-Xian 
- Abstract
- Is it possible that emotional display rule exists in the parenting domain? Recent years have seen a set of gradual changes in parenting, which has developed into duties with parts of it requiring parents to exhibit more positive emotion to their children and control negative emotions while parenting. Drawing hypotheses from emotional labor research in work settings (e.g., Grandey, 2003), the present article aims to translate the emotional labor paradigm into the parenting context. It examines specifically four questions (1) Do parents perceive display rules? (i.e., do they feel pressured to up-regulate positive emotions and down-regulate negative emotions while parenting?) (2) Do parents make regulatory efforts to comply with these rules? (3) Is this costly? (and which, from up-regulation or down-regulation, is the costliest to parents? And are there any strategies to make this effort less costly?) (4) Is it possible that emotional labor in the parenting domain contributes to increasing the risk of parental burnout? We investigated these questions using path analyses in a sample of 347 parents. Our findings show not only that emotion display rules exist in parenting, but also that parents make regulatory efforts to meet these rules. Whether they regulate their emotions superficially (surface acting, i.e., putting a mask) or genuinely (deep acting; changing one’s emotion) increases in both cases the risk of parental burnout because of the efforts entailed. This study, the first to translate the emotional labor paradigm into the parenting context, suggests that pressures on parents may backfire.
- Affiliations
Citations
Lin, G.-X., Roskam, I., Mikolajczak, M., Roskam, I., Meeussen, L., & Mikolajczak, M. (2021). Parenting with a smile: Display rules, regulatory effort, and parental burnout. Annual Meeting of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences, In virtual. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/106186