Parental meta-emotion philosophy and children's classroom emotional regulation: the moderating role of teacher-student interaction quality.

Whether children can manage affect inside the classroom now sits at the center of debates about school readiness, yet the family belief systems that shape this capacity are rarely examined within instructional settings. We asked how parental meta-emotion philosophy relates to change in two facets of children's classroom emotional regulation-adaptive regulation and lability/negativity-across one academic year, and whether teacher-student interaction quality conditions those associations. A two-wave panel design with a 12-month interval followed 289 child-parent dyads (children aged 6-8 years) drawn from six public elementary schools in an eastern-Chinese metropolitan area. Parents completed the Chinese adaptation of the Maternal Emotional Style Questionnaire at baseline; trained observers coded children's classroom emotional regulation at both waves; and teacher-student interaction quality was rated with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, concurrently with the second wave of the outcome. Multilevel regression-children nested in classrooms-showed that emotion coaching at T1 forecast higher T2 adaptive regulation ( β = 0.17, p = 0.002) and, more modestly, lower lability/negativity ( β = - 0.11, p = 0.041), whereas emotion dismissing forecast lower adaptive regulation ( β = - 0.13, p = 0.018) and higher lability/negativity ( β = 0.15, p = 0.009), with baseline regulation, demographics, and classroom clustering controlled throughout. Teacher emotional support conditioned the family-level pathways on both facets: coaching effects were amplified where emotional support was high, whereas dismissing effects were partially buffered under the same condition. Classroom organization and instructional support moderated neither pathway. These findings extend meta-emotion theory into the instructional domain and offer evidence, in a Chinese context where coaching and dismissing beliefs may co-exist, for bioecological mesosystem interdependence between family and school microsystems.