Parental Mediation of COVID-19 News and Children's Emotion Regulation during Lockdown

The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in a large amount of emotionally charged messaging that is believed to have a tremendouspsychological impact, particularly on children and early adolescents. The present study examined the relationships betweenchildren’s exposure to COVID-19 news, children’s emotional responses to the news, parental styles of mediating COVID-19news, and children’s emotional functioning during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy in April 2020. An online survey wascompleted by 277 parents (Mage = 43.36; SDage = 4.76; mothers = 89.5%) with children aged 6 to 13 years. Regressionanalyses showed that the parental active mediation style was associated with higher emotion regulation and lower lability/negativity, whereas the restrictive style was associated with higher lability/negativity and the social coviewing style wasassociated with lower emotion regulation. The results provide evidence for how adults using an active style can mediatemessages to reduce children’s emotional difficulties during events with high emotional involvement.