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Parents and their parenting practices are important factors that are closely linked to children’s overall development (Lengua & Kovacs, 2005). In their influential literature review, Maccoby and Martin (1983) referred to parenting with two major dimensions: “responsiveness” and “demandingness”. Similarly, Suchman et al. (2007) posited that parental warmth and parental control were two broad dimensions of parenting practices closely yet differentially associated with children’s psychosocial adjustment. Specifically, positive and supportive parenting practices involving parental warmth (emotional expression of love by parents to support and accept their child’s needs) are associated with better child outcomes such as prosocial behavior and promoted well-being (Halgunseth, 2009; Lam et al., 2018; Leerkes & Augustine, 2019). In contrast, as the two forms of unsupportive parental control (Amato, 1990), physical coercion (a controlling and restrictive parent-child interaction using physically intimidating means, e.g., slapping and spanking) and psychological control (parents manipulating children’s thoughts, emotions, and attachments in indiscernible ways to achieve control over children’s conduct, e.g., guilt induction and shaming) are often associated with increased externalizing and internalizing behaviors in children (Barber et al., 1994; Nelson et al., 2006). As such, it is important to examine factors such as parental cognitive reappraisal that may influence parents’ choice of parenting strategies, as well as the role of mindful parenting as a mediator in this association, in order to effectively promote the development of young children.
Parenting is a complex, skill-based task that involves an emotion-generating process (Dix, 1991; John & Gross, 2004; Lau & Williams, 2021). Dix’s model of the affective process in parenting (1991) suggested that parents’ parenting practices are influenced by their emotional activation, engagement, and regulation. As one of the most studied emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal is the cognitive aspect of the emotion regulation process that involves the ability to modify the emotional impact by changing the thoughts associated with the emotion-triggering events (Gross, 1998). It is generally considered a highly adaptive individual skill because it is associated with higher levels of social functioning and more positive psychosocial outcomes (John & Gross, 2004). Parental cognitive reappraisal has been found to be associated with both positive parenting behaviors and coercive parenting practices, the two kinds of practices that are orthogonal and used by many parents (Deater-Deckard et al., 2016;...