Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: The Mediating Role of Parenting Emotion Regulation in the Relationship between Parental Childhood Experiences and Child Socioemotional Problems

Abstract

Background: Adverse childhood experiences are common and can affect parenting and offspring adjustment across generations, yet the psychological mechanisms that translate parental childhood adversity into child socioemotional problems remain incompletely specified.

Objective: The study tested whether parental emotion regulation difficulties mediate links between parental childhood trauma and children’s socioemotional difficulties and whether particular regulation capacities and specific trauma types are especially important for transmission.

Method: Using a community sample of parent–child dyads from urban and suburban Punjab, Pakistan, parents completed validated measures of retrospective childhood adversity, current emotion regulation difficulties, and their children’s socioemotional functioning; hierarchical regression evaluated direct associations while contemporary mediation methods with bias-corrected resampling examined overall and dimension-specific indirect pathways for different trauma domains, with demographic covariates included in all models.

Results: Parental childhood adversity was associated with greater child socioemotional problems, and parental emotion regulation difficulties accounted for a substantial portion of this association. Dimension-level analyses indicated that difficulties maintaining goal-directed behavior when distressed and limited access to adaptive regulation strategies were the most consistent and potent mediators across trauma types, whereas basic emotional awareness showed weaker indirect effects. Emotional forms of maltreatment (emotional abuse and emotional neglect) operated more strongly through emotion dysregulation than did physical or sexual maltreatment, and mediation was often partial, indicating that additional mechanisms such as attachment representations, trauma-related cognitions, and social resources also contribute.

Conclusions: Findings identify parental emotion regulation, particularly behavioral persistence under distress and strategy repertoires, as a proximal, modifiable mechanism of intergenerational transmission and support integrating concise, skills-based emotion-regulation training into trauma-informed parenting programs to disrupt cycles of adversity. Keywords: intergenerational trauma, emotion regulation, parenting, childhood adversity, child socioemotional development.