Validation of the Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire Among Chinese Families of Preschoolers

Parents play a crucial role in fostering children’s emotion regulation skills during early childhood. The Parental Assistance with Child Emotion Regulation (PACER) Questionnaire was newly developed to assess how parents support their children’s use of specific emotion regulation strategies. This study was aimed to validate the PACER in the Chinese context. Data were collected from 2002 mothers and 1069 fathers of preschool-aged children in China. The results supported the intended 10-factor structure of the PACER. All subscales demonstrated good to excellent internal consistencies. Measurement invariance was achieved across both child gender and parent gender. The study further explored how parent and child genders were related to parents’ reports on the PACER. Using data from a subset of the families that provided both maternal and paternal reports (n = 507), we found that parents’ responses generally did not differ between daughters and sons. However, significant gender differences among parents were found, albeit the effect sizes were small. Mothers were more likely to adopt adaptive strategies and less likely to rely on maladaptive strategies compared to fathers. These findings validated the applicability of the PACER in Chinese culture. The parental gender differences observed underscore the need to create tailored interventions for mothers and fathers regarding children’s emotion socialization.