Even though emotional resilience of children is mostly discussed in terms of post-traumatic large-scale events such as natural disasters and  war or family-related issues such as divorce and abuse, it may not be limited to emotionally disruptive cases. In fact, most of the studies in the related literature (e.g., Freud & Burlingham, 1943; Flouri et al., 2015; McFarlane & Van Hooff, 2009) highlights the importance of supporting children’s emotional resilience in everyday life, not just after traumatic experiences, although they were examining emotional resilience of children who have experienced traumatic events. In that, resilience is defined as the ability to adapt successfully in adverse situations by demonstrating good internal and external adjustment, absence or limited levels of negative behaviors, and social and academic achievement (Masten, 2011). Although it continues to develop throughout the lifespan, it starts to develop at an early age, first at home, then in early learning settings, and contributes to children’s adaptability in social contexts (Masten, 2001). In addition, it is known as a quality that can be developed from a very young age by the systems influencing children’s life such as home environment, school and society, respectively (Masten, 2001). 

Regarding these systems, it is known that children’s development in any kind of domain is hard to be considered in isolation from the context (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In that, for early emotional development, parents are considered  one of the most important contributors acting as their primary agents for the socialization of their emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Thus, parental practices that contribute to children's emotional resilience are strongly associated with children’s social and emotional functioning (Boughton & Lumley, 2011; Demircioğlu, 2017). In other words, parental emotion-related practices such as emotional support, emotional discussions, and emotion displays may help children  recognize, understand, express, and regulate their emotions (Zinsser et al., 2021). Additionally, it was shown that parental guidance in fostering children’s emotional development by helping children regulate their emotions or nurturing an emotionally supportive relationship is associated with greater emotional resilience in the early years (Gus et al., 2015).

Although the established significance of parental roles as agents of emotional socialization, the need for a valid and reliable instrument to measure the levels of contribution of parents to the emotional resilience of their children remains. The existing scales mostly focus on parental emotion socialization (e.g., O’Neal & Magai, 2005) or isolated aspects of emotional resilience such as emotion regulation (e.g., Perry & Dollar, 2021) or self-efficacy (e.g., Sticca et al., 2020). These scales are different in terms of their broader scope of parental role in children’s emotional resilience. To address this gap, the present study aims to construct and validate a parental contribution scale for emotional resilience of children and to bridge existing gaps in the literature while offering practical insights for researchers and practitioners. The scale is designed to assess the levels of parental contribution in children’s emotional resilience in terms of emotional awareness, emotion regulation and emotional support. In this study, the preliminary results and construction process is presented.

For the item pool, items were created based on the combination of the insights from the related literature and the cognitive interviews conducted with parents. As a result of the item creation, five items for each of the three predetermined subscale were written. Following that, the item pool was sent to two early childhood education experts for their opinion and some of the items were revised according to the obtained feedback. The preliminary version of the scale consisting of 15 items was developed as a 5-point Likert type scale. This preliminary version of the scale was tested through a pilot study with 136 mothers of preschool-aged children residing in Ankara, Turkiye. The target sample size for the present study was determined based upon the rule of thumb of 10 participants per each item (Gorsuch, 2015). In the data collection, even though the targeted sample size could not be achieved because of the low response rate, the achieved sample size was a very close number to the target. For the data analysis exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used respectively. First, EFA was used to explore the existence of potential latent factors. Following that, CFA was used to confirm the validity of the extracted factor solution and to test the fit of the model. Subsequently, reliability analysis was performed employing the Cronbach alpha and McDonald omega to assess the internal consistency of the extracted subscales. The data analysis for this pilot study was conducted employing R (R Core Team, 2021) software.

The preliminary factor structure extracted by EFA indicated that the scale could be unidimensional as it is suggested in the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalue > 1) and the scree plot. In this single factor, the factor loadings were inspected using a minimum loading threshold of 0.40 (Gorsuch, 2015). Accordingly, it was observed that the factor loadings of items 1 and 3 did not meet the threshold and these items were not aligned with the extracted single dimension. After the removal of these problematic items, the scale demonstrated a single-factor structure, explaining 49.74% of the total variance. The extracted unidimensional structure was tested to confirm the factor solution with CFA. The CFA results were verified the unidimensional structure with fit indices indications an admissible model fit (χ²=98.08, df=44, p=0.00, RMSEA=0.09, SRMR=0.06, NNFI=0.89, TLI=0.89, CFI=0.91, GFI=0.88). Finally, the reliability of this preliminary scale was assessed by Cronbach alpha and McDonald omega for the internal consistency coefficient. The results indicated the both Cronbach alpha and McDonald omega score was calculated as .90 indicating a high level of reliability. Considering the preliminary statistical findings, it was seen that the previously determined subdimensions as emotional awareness, emotion regulation, and emotional support functioned as a single dimension which focus on parental support in emotional resilience of young children. This study is a part of an ongoing project and the data was collected from the pre-test phase of the participants who are going to attend a series of education regarding supporting emotional resilience in early years. Thus, this preliminary study has a limitation regarding the participants and the follow-up process may indicate different results.

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