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AbstractThis study examined associations among family‐level risks, emotional climate, and child adjustment in families experiencing homelessness. Emotional climate, an indirect aspect of emotion socialization, was indexed by parents' expressed emotion while describing their children. Sociodemographic risk and parent internalizing distress were hypothesized to predict more negativity and less warmth in the emotional climate. Emotional climate was expected to predict observer‐rated child affect and teacher‐reported socioemotional adjustment, mediating effects of risk. Participants were 138 homeless parents (64 percent African‐American) and their four‐ to six‐year‐old children (43.5 percent male). During semi‐structured interviews, parents reported demographic risks and internalizing distress and completed a Five Minute Speech Sample about their child, later rated for warmth and negativity. Children's positive and negative affect were coded from videotapes of structured parent‐child interaction tasks. Socioemotional adjustment (externalizing behavior, peer acceptance, and prosocial behavior) was reported by teachers a few months later. Hypotheses were partially supported. Parent internalizing distress was associated with higher parent negativity, which was linked to more negative affect in children, and parent warmth was associated with children's positive affect. Neither emotional climate nor child affect predicted teacher‐reported externalizing behavior or peer acceptance, but parental negativity and male sex predicted lower prosocial behavior in the classroom. Future research directions and clinical implications are discussed.

AbstractParenting shapes the development of emotion regulation skills in early childhood, laying a key foundation for social‐emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, high adversity exposure may disrupt parental emotion socialization practices and children's regulatory development. The current study used variable‐ and person‐centered approaches to evaluate links among parental emotion expressiveness, children's observed emotion regulation, and teacher‐reported adjustment among 214 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children experiencing homelessness, an indicator of high cumulative risk and acute adversity. Structured parent‐child interaction tasks were recorded on site in emergency shelters over the summer and micro‐socially coded for parent and child expressions of anger, positive affect, and internalizing distress. We anticipated that parental modeling of predominantly negative emotion expression would be associated with more child dysregulation during parent‐child interaction and worse adjustment at school, as reported by teachers the following school year. Preliminary analyses indicated that children's observed difficulty downregulating anger was associated robustly with teacher‐reported social‐behavioral problems. Latent profile analysis was used to identify three patterns of parental emotion expression characterized by above‐average expression of positive affect, internalizing distress, and anger. Parents' likelihood of membership in the elevated anger profile significantly predicted children's observed difficulty down‐regulating anger and higher social‐behavioral problems at school. In addition to ongoing efforts to reduce poverty‐related risk, supporting adaptive anger regulation in parents and young children may be important for enhancing resilience among families experiencing homelessness and similar conditions of high cumulative risk.