Parental Emotion Socialization and Child Development

Parental emotion socialization encompasses the strategies, behaviours and beliefs through which caregivers shape children’s emotional understanding, expression and regulatory capacities. From infancy to adolescence, parents serve as emotion coaches, models and regulators, responding to children’s displays of joy, anger, fear and sadness. Supportive practices—such as validating feelings, guiding children through emotional experiences and modelling adaptive regulation—foster emotional competence, social skills and resilience. Conversely, unsupportive responses—such as dismissing, punishing or minimising emotions—undermine self-regulation and can heighten risk for internalising and externalising problems. Cross-cultural studies reveal that familial norms, parental beliefs and broader social contexts interact to influence which emotions are encouraged or suppressed. Evidence increasingly points to the mediating role of child emotion regulation in linking parental socialisation to developmental outcomes, while parent factors such as meta-emotional philosophy, mental health and regulatory skills moderate these pathways. Understanding these interconnections has spurred family-centred interventions targeting modifiable parenting behaviours to promote healthy emotional development and mental well-being globally.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work using a person-centred approach with mothers of toddlers identified three distinct emotion socialization profiles: supportive, mixture and unspecified. Mothers in the supportive profile—characterised by high use of comforting and coaching strategies—also exhibited stronger cognitive reappraisal skills, fewer mental health symptoms and a greater sense of parenting competence than those in the mixture or unspecified profiles. These findings underscore individual differences in caregiver emotion regulation and well-being as key correlates of adaptive socialization and suggest that enhancing parental reappraisal may bolster both parental confidence and children’s emerging emotional skills.

Parental Emotion Socialization and Child Development publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in parental emotion socialization and child development across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Emotion socialization: Parental practices and responses that shape children’s understanding, expression and management of emotions.

Emotion regulation: Processes by which individuals monitor, evaluate and modify emotional reactions to achieve goals.

Supportive emotion socialization: Caregiver behaviours that validate children’s emotions, offer comfort and provide guidance.

Unsupportive emotion socialization: Responses that dismiss, punish or minimise children’s emotional expressions.

Cognitive reappraisal: Strategy involving reframing a situation to alter its emotional impact.

Expressive suppression: Strategy involving inhibition of emotion-expressive behaviour after an emotion has been elicited.

References

1. A person-based approach to emotion socialization in toddlerhood: Individual differences in maternal emotion regulation, mental-health and parental sense of competence. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Research Review: Child emotion regulation mediates the association between family factors and internalizing symptoms in children and adolescents – a meta‐analysis. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2023).
3. The Challenge of Chinese Children’s Emotion Regulation: Child Number, Parental Emotion Regulation, and Its Relationship with Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions. Sustainability (2023).
4. The Influence of Parents on Emotion Regulation in Middle Childhood: A Systematic Review. Children (2022).