Parental Contributions to Preschoolers' Understanding of Emotion

SUMMARY We hypothesized that parents who express positive emotions and are supportive of their preschoolers' emotional expressions and experiences are likely to engage in talking and teaching about emotions, thereby enhancing children's emotion knowledge. Observational and self-report indices of parents' socialization of emotion were obtained for 134 families when children were 3 and 4 years old, along with children's emotion knowledge from ages 3 to 5. Mothers' valuing teaching about emotions mediated the positive effects of their positive expressions and reactions on the emotion knowledge of 3-year-olds. More limited paternal contributions were found for 4-year-olds' emotion knowledge only. Departures from predicted relations suggested that fathers might see their role in emotion socialization as different from that of mothers. Prediction of 5-year-old emotion knowledge was not as strong as at earlier ages.