The Child and Parent Emotion Study

Introduction: Parents shape child emotional competence and mental health via their beliefs about children’s emotions, by modelling emotion regulation skills, emotion-related parenting, and the emotional climate of the family. Much of the research to date has been based on small samples with mothers of primary school-aged children. The Child and Parent Emotion Study (CAPES) aims to examine longitudinal associations between parent emotion socialisation, child emotion regulation and socioemotional adjustment at four time points. CAPES will investigate the moderating role of parent gender, child temperament and gender, and family background. Methods: CAPES is an age-stratified longitudinal cohort study. CAPES recruited 1,992 parents of children aged 0–9 years and 264 prospective parents (i.e, pregnant parents of their first child) in 2018–2019. Parents are residents of six English-speaking countries (i.e., Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, UK, Ireland). Participants completed online self-report surveys that included several measures of parent outcomes, including parent emotion socialisation (e.g., parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions, parents’ stress), and age-sensitive measures of child outcomes (e.g., child emotion regulation, child internalising problems). Between 2018 and 2021, three timepoints of data have been collected, in intervals of approximately 12 months. Data collection for time 4 will be completed by late 2022. This dataset includes three timepoints of data, for participants who consented to share their data (N=2,069).