What do parents know about their children's comprehension of emotions? Accuracy of parental estimates in a community sample of pre-schoolers
Parents' ability to correctly perceive their child's skills has implications for how the child develops. In some studies, parents have shown to overestimate their child's abilities in areas such as IQ, memory and language. Emotion Comprehension (EC) is a skill central to children's emotion regulation, initially learned from their parents. In this cross-sectional study we first tested children's EC and then asked parents to estimate the child's performance. Thus, a measure of accuracy between child performance and parents' estimates was obtained. Subsequently, we obtained information on child and parent factors that might predict parents' accuracy in estimating their child's EC.