Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood

Social-emotional development during the first five years of life encompasses the growing ability of children to experience, regulate and express emotions, to form secure relationships, and to navigate social environments. This period represents a sensitive window in which neural circuits underlying emotion processing and self-regulation mature rapidly. Young children learn to recognise their own feelings and those of others, to manage emotional arousal, and to deploy strategies such as seeking comfort or reframing a distressing situation. Crucially, these capacities emerge through repeated, responsive interactions with caregivers and peers, a process often referred to as co-regulation. Early social-emotional skills lay the groundwork for later academic readiness, mental health and social competence, influencing trajectories of learning, behaviour and well-being across the lifespan. Global research highlights both universal developmental patterns and variations shaped by cultural values, caregiving practices and socioeconomic context. Interventions that bolster caregiver sensitivity, foster emotion-focused teaching and promote emotion coaching have demonstrated practical benefits for children’s self-regulation, empathy and prosocial engagement.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have illuminated how cultural norms and caregiver modelling shape children’s emotional growth. Comparative work examining mother–child interactions across distinct societies has revealed systematic differences in the intensity and content of emotion talk. In some contexts, caregivers emphasise the verbal labelling of feelings, while in others they encourage more muted emotional expression. Such variations not only reflect broader socialisation goals but also influence children’s emerging capacity to articulate and regulate emotion. Gender-specific patterns have also been documented, with boys and girls displaying distinct profiles of emotional expression and vocabulary during shared activities. These findings underscore the role of maternal scaffolding in guiding preschoolers towards culturally appropriate emotional understanding and behaviour.

Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in social-emotional development in early childhood across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Social-emotional development: The progressive acquisition of skills that enable children to recognise, express and manage emotions and to form positive relationships with others.

Co-regulation: The interactive process by which caregivers and children mutually support the child’s emerging self-regulation through responsive guidance and emotional attunement.

Emotion regulation: The ability to monitor, evaluate and modify emotional reactions in order to achieve adaptive outcomes in response to internal and external demands.

Emotional competence: A set of skills including emotion recognition, understanding, expression and regulation that underpins effective social functioning.

Prosocial behaviour: Voluntary actions intended to benefit others, such as helping, sharing or showing empathy, which are influenced by early emotion socialisation.

References

1. Thai and American mothers socialize preschoolers’ emotional development differently. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Are You Ready for a Story? Kindergarten Children’s Emotional Competencies during a Story-Reading Situation Is Associated with Their Readiness for School. Education Sciences (2023).
3. Help Me If You Can I’m Feeling Down: Supporting Children’s Emotion Regulation and Well-Being in the Primary Classroom. School Mental Health (2024).
4. A unidimensional model of emotion-focused teaching in early childhood. Learning Environments Research (2023).