It is widely acknowledged that parents’ beliefs about their competence to parent (i.e., parental self-efficacy; PSE) influence an array of important outcomes, such as parenting behaviours, and parents’ and children’s psychological functioning. PSE is essential in parental navigation of day-to-day activities, and has thus been studied across multiple domains. One domain which, surprisingly, has received little attention is how competent parents feel to manage their children’s emotions (i.e., emotion socialization-related PSE). To supplement the extant utilization of quantitative methodology, and to investigate PSE in the context of emotion socialization, we qualitatively investigated parents’ beliefs about their competence to teach and handle their children’s emotions. Given that men and women often occupy distinct roles informed by gender differentiated sociocultural norms, we also uniquely examined and compared mothers’ and fathers’ perspectives on emotion socialization-related PSE. Mothers (n = 40) and fathers (n = 42) of children between the ages of 8 to 12 discussed PSE in focus groups. Content analysis explicated the nature of emotion socialization-related PSE as well as six factors that bolster and diminish PSE. Similar categories emerged for mothers and fathers, with some notable gender differences in the extent to which certain facilitators (i.e., emotion skills, resources, social support and the parent-child relationship) and barriers (i.e., inadequate resources) were described as influential in PSE. Findings are discussed in light of their possible clinical utility in tailoring parenting interventions and future research directions.
