Emotional Development of Children

Cultural Differences Related to Emotion Socialization among Children Emotional socialization among children is determined to a large extent by the cultural environment in which the child is raised (Raval & Walker, 2019). The most common agents of socialization to which individuals are exposed from a young age include family (mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts) and peers (neighbors, teachers, friends at school or church or daycare) and media representations (kids’ shows, cartoons, movies).

As Chen, Zhou, Main and Lee (2015 show, socialization agents include people in one’s environment, people in media and people in one’s family. The media can be especially important because even if they are just make-believe cartoon characters, they still represent a socialization agent for the child. Over time these socialization agents will change, of course. The individual child will stop relying so much on family and start focusing more on technology or mass media or peers or school or religion for socialization.

Inherent in each of these agents, however, is an aspect of culture. Family is probably the most important agent of socialization in the younger stages of development, but once the individual begins to have a sense of independence, that socialization process kicks over into a different direction and the individual wants to be more accepted in other groups than just one’s family.

So a church group or a school group or a work group or a street group or any other kind of group might be more appealing to the person and so they become a more powerful socialization agent for the individual. Some of the cues and behaviors that individuals learn through the socialization process across their life span include what to believe about religion, what to think about politics, how to view gender roles or how to view different races or ethnicities.

For children, the emotions and the regulation of the emotions are the main behaviors that are learned through socialization (Raval & Walker, 2019). Children perceive how others react in certain situations, and they imitate their behavioral responses often in similar contexts and situations (Raval & Walker, 2019).

They are especially attentive to how their parents demonstrate emotion, which is why there are two main parental emotional socialization strategies that parents typically use: their emotional expressiveness and their reactions to children’s emotional responses—i.e., whether their reactions are supportive of their child’s emotions, or non-supportive (Brown, Craig & Halberstadt, 2015). Chen et al.

(2015) note even that “though parents of different cultures may vary in their patterns of emotional expression…the effects of parents’ emotional expression on children’s development appear to be consistent across cultures” (p. 619). In other words, it is a universal phenomenon that parents are able to impact the development of the child’s emotional socialization ability.

The extent to which children are able to regulate their emotions is determined, therefore, to a large extent by how their parents regulate their own emotions and the degree to which the parents are supportive of their children’s emotions. While self-regulation of the emotions can be quite difficult for children to achieve in short order, the more love, affection, support and guidance they receive the more likely they are to develop regulatory skills that enable them to control their emotions in a positive manner.

There is also the idea that social learning comes into play in this learning process, as social learning theory holds that children learn from watching others—i.e., by the way people act, talk, socialize and so on (Chen et al., 2015). Culture also plays a part in the process, however, as Raval and Walker (2019) show.

Raval and Walker (2019) look at the social and emotional competence of children, the relationships with peers, their self-esteem levels, the ways in which they internalize and externalize their feelings and compare all of this with the cultural inputs they receive from their guardians. In doing so, they make connections between the way culture is expressed and the manner in which children’s emotion socialization takes place.

As familial cultures differ across populations, they find that “caregiver emotion socialization behaviors that are associated with adaptive child outcomes in White middle-class families…may not be related to adaptive child functioning in other cultural groups” (Raval & Walker, 2019, p. 146). This means that other cultures are likely to have their own emotion socialization cues and expressions that are used in the development of children’s emotion socialization. Another factor in determining the regulation of emotions and how emotion socialization develops is gender (Brown et al., 2015).

The gender factor likewise differs across cultures so that in some cultures, both mothers and fathers tend to show equal amounts of negative support towards a child’s behavior, while in other cultures, the mother may be more supportive than the father or vice versa (Brown et al., 2015). Additionally, the gender of the child is found to be factor in the levels of support that a parent shows: “Mothers were generally more supportive of girls’ negative emotions than fathers across all ethnicities.

For boys, however, parent gender differences in supportive reactions to negative emotions varied by ethnicity. Mothers were more supportive than fathers among European American parents of boys, but mothers were less supportive than fathers among African American parents of boys” (Brown et al., 2015, p. 135).

This cultural difference in the ways gender factor into the emotion socialization development of children show that the process should be considered by more than just the conventional paradigms of family, peers and groups, and media inputs: culture clearly matters and culture impacts the ways in which gender factors into the process. Chen et al.

(2015) show that culture orientations will play a part in the parents’ emotional expressiveness that they demonstrate towards their children, which will in turn impact the child’s ability to self-regulate emotions and to develop emotion socialization skills. Their study compared Chinese and American parents and used self-reported survey data to gauge how parents perceived their own approaches and impacts on the child’s emotional development.

While this study was helpful in showing that cultural differences will alter perceptions about emotion and behavior, the evidence of self-reported data is typically not without its element of bias and therefore the validity of this kind of study can limit the extent to which findings are generalizeable. Overall, the value of the study on the effect of culture on emotion socialization is that it reveals how numerous factors will shape the development of the child’s emotions beyond simply being affected by peers, family and media.

The way in which children learn about themselves and their emotions is commonly achieved through play, through observation, through parental feedback, through self-awareness and through a process of trial and error (with respect to how parents may handle the situation). Parents themselves are more likely to respond one way or another based on their own gender, their own ethnicity, and their own cultural inputs (Brown et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2015; Raval & Walker, 2019).

As children begin to develop emotional awareness over time, they pick up more on the cues that their parents are signaling them, and they also begin to incorporate the cultural dimensions of behavior that they see in their media, their peers’ behavior, and their parental reactions to their own emotional displays. The children begin to develop emotion socialization skills along the cultural lines that are exampled for them.

As cultural inputs inform media representations, parental behaviors and cognitions about how children should behave, and peer interaction, this is a normal area for understanding how emotion socialization transpires.

As parents engage their children about their own feelings, children learn to be mindful of how their parents want them to behave—but this mindfulness is not a plateau, nor is the development ever static; rather, it is ongoing and there is a great deal of back-and-forth, of negotiation, between the child and the adult (Chen et al., 2015), particularly as both are learning to understand the other: the child is learning to understand the parents’ emotional responses and the parents are learning to understand the child’s emotional responses.

At the same time, the child is learning to understand his own emotional responses to others, which means there is a triadic development of cognition. If the parents are also cognitive of their own emotional development as adults (for the process does not ever end), then the relationship can actually be conceptualized as quadratic: four-sided and incorporative of parents and child understanding themselves and each other (Brown et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2015; Raval & Walker, 2019). Parents and children interact in different settings, within various cultural frameworks.

Culture itself is never static and cultural inputs can fluctuate from environment to environment, thus impacting the manner in which parents and children negotiate their understanding of self and other. For instance, emotion socialization may transpire and develop differently in a church setting than it may on a playground. Children may be treated differently in a school classroom than they would in a familiar home.

Time of day may also impact the emotion socialization process, which parents and children both negotiating the process differently depending on whether they are tired, hungry, whether parents themselves are worn out or feeling as though.