Students whose parents were warmer towards them tend to have better socio-emotional skills

A study of college students in China found that students whose parents, both mother and father, were warmer towards them tended to have better socio-emotional skills. They also reported better social and psychological well-being. The research was published in the Journal of Psychology.

Socio-emotional skills are abilities that help people understand and manage their own emotions, build healthy relationships, and make responsible decisions. They include self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, communication, and cooperation. These skills are important because they support mental health, academic success, and positive social interactions throughout life.

Children with strong socio-emotional skills are better at coping with stress, resolving conflicts, and working effectively with peers. In adulthood, these abilities contribute to teamwork, leadership, and resilience in the workplace and personal life. Socio-emotional skills also reduce the risk of behavioral problems, anxiety, and depression by fostering emotional balance and supportive networks.

Their development begins in early childhood through family interactions, play, and early education. Schools that integrate socio-emotional learning (SEL) help students practice empathy, cooperation, and responsible decision-making in structured ways. Positive role models and secure attachments further strengthen these skills. Cultural and community contexts shape how socio-emotional skills are expressed and valued. Like cognitive abilities, they can be trained and improved at any age through practice and feedback.

Study author Xiaotian Zhang and his colleagues wanted to explore the links between parental warmth and the development of socio-emotional skills. They hypothesized that parental warmth fosters children’s social and psychological well-being, which in turn allows them to develop better socio-emotional skills.

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Study participants were first- and second-year college students from three public universities in mainland China. Their average age was 19 to 20 years. As the data were collected on two occasions, 832 students completed the questionnaires on the first occasion, but only 362 of them completed them on the second, making 362 the number of participants included in the analyses.

Participants completed a set of questionnaires containing assessments of maternal and paternal warmth (the Japanese Parenting Style Scale), social and psychological well-being (the Mental Health Continuum Short Form, e.g., “I have something important to contribute to society” and “I like most parts of my personality”), and socio-emotional skills (the Social Emotional Skills Scale).

Results showed that participants reporting greater maternal warmth also tended to report greater paternal warmth and vice versa. Participants reporting greater parental warmth also tended to report higher social and psychological well-being, as well as stronger socio-emotional skills.

When the study authors created a statistical model (structural equation model) that controlled for the unique contributions of the studied characteristics, results showed that paternal, but not maternal, warmth uniquely predicted students’ social well-being. This model also suggested that paternal and maternal warmth may foster the development of students’ socio-emotional skills by improving their psychological and social well-being.

“These results underscored the nuanced roles of parental warmth in shaping the emotional and social development of emerging adults, highlighting the interconnectedness of psychological and social factors in parental impact research,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the links between parental warmth, socio-emotional skills, and well-being. However, the design of the study does not allow any definitive causal inferences to be drawn from the results. Additionally, all the data came from self-reports and recalled memories of childhood, leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the findings.

The paper, “Perceived Parental Warmth and Young Adults’ Social-Emotional Skills: Influence Through Social and Psychological Well-Being,” was authored by Xiaotian Zhang, Yi Wang, and Feng Geng.