# Caregiver Assistance with Young Children’s Emotion Regulation Strategies: Correspondence Between Global and Momentary Reports

## TL;DR

This study explores how well caregivers' general reports match their real-time reports of helping young children regulate emotions.

## Contribution

It identifies discrepancies between global and momentary reports of caregiver assistance with specific emotion regulation strategies.

## Key findings

- Global and momentary reports aligned for acceptance and expressive suppression strategies.
- No correspondence was found for distraction or cognitive reappraisal strategies.
- Results suggest global measures may not accurately reflect daily caregiver behaviors.

## Abstract

Caregivers play a central role in children’s emotion regulation development. Caregiver assistance with children’s deployment of specific emotion regulation strategies has gained attention in the literature as a key component of emotion socialization. Many studies have examined caregiver support for child emotion regulation strategies using global caregiver self-report measures, but few have leveraged ecological momentary assessment methods to learn about these momentary co-regulatory behaviors in daily life. Furthermore, the degree to which global and momentary reports correspond with each other remains unknown. Discrepancies between global versus momentary reports have important implications for research design and interpretation. The present study evaluated the degree to which caregiver reports of assistance with child emotion regulation strategies collected using ecological momentary assessment aligned with global, retrospective reports. Analyses focused on four emotion regulation strategies: acceptance, distraction, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression. A USA sample of 174 primary caregivers with children ages 1–5.5 years completed online check-ins up to three times per day for seven days. Caregivers reported their child’s emotion and the emotion regulation strategies they helped their child use. Before they began the week of check-ins, caregivers completed a global measure of assistance with child emotion regulation strategies. Correlation and regression analyses showed evidence of correspondence between global and momentary reports for acceptance and expressive suppression, but not for distraction or cognitive reappraisal. The results caution against assuming global measures of caregiver assistance with child emotion regulations strategies uniformly reflect implementation in the context of daily parent–child interaction.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-025-00308-x.