Family Systems and Emotional Functioning in Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Preschool Children.

The study measured everything at one time, so it cannot show whether family cohesion affects child emotion expression or child emotion expression affects family cohesion. The DHH and hearing groups were not the same age: hearing children were older on average, and the analysis used weighting to adjust for this. All child emotion outcomes were rated by parents. Family adaptability was removed from the main regression model because it overlapped strongly with family cohesion. The DHH sample was narrow: all had hearing parents, attended special classes with only DHH peers, and used spoken language; many had profound loss and intensive early intervention, so results may not apply to families with DHH parents, sign-language users, or children with additional disabilities. Missing data were substantial for some variables, including nonverbal intelligence for 42 participants and socioeconomic information. 246 children were approached and 205 were included, although the excluded sample did not differ from the included sample on key characteristics.

The supplied text lists the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences as funder and labels the study as non-U.S. government research support. It does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.

Do not read these associations as proof that increasing family cohesion or parental emotion communication will improve a child's emotional functioning. The study is cross-sectional, and more parental emotion communication was linked to more negative emotion expression in both groups, so the direction of any effect is unclear.