How We Talk About Emotions at Home: What a Child Learns From Our Words
Children learn to name, understand, and manage what they feel largely within the family, by watching adults and taking part in the family’s everyday emotional life (Morris et al., 2007). Imagine a 4-year-old who falls off a swing and starts to cry: If the adult says, “You’re okay, don’t cry,” they minimize the emotion; if they say, “That really scared you!” they acknowledge it and give it a name (Gottman et al., 1996). No single phrase defines the person who says it, because what research examines is adults’ overall orientation toward their own emotions and those of their children (Gottman et al., 1996). And that orientation can change: According to Havighurst et al. (2010), a program for mothers and fathers improved parents’ practices and preschool children’s emotion knowledge.
What Emotion Socialization Is and Why It Happens in Everyday Life
Emotion socialization is the way adults influence children’s emotions and social competence: how they react to children’s emotions, how they talk about them, and how they express their own (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Most of these studies are correlational, and the process is bidirectional, because children also influence how adults respond to them (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Morris et al. (2007) propose that children learn to regulate their emotions by observing adults, through parenting practices, and within the family’s emotional climate, which also includes the parents’ relationship as a couple.
What Happens in the Brain When We Put Feelings Into Words
From a neuropsychological perspective, self-regulation relies on executive functions (working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control), skills that children are not born with but develop gradually into early adulthood (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2012). According to Somerville (2016), it is best to be wary of exact figures for the age at which the brain “finishes” maturing, because neuroscience is still debating how to define and measure that maturity.
Language is one of the tools of this regulation: In a study that followed 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, those with better language skills appeared less angry at age 4, partly because they sought support or distracted themselves while they had to wait (Roben et al., 2013). As Lindquist et al. (2015) propose, emotion words also help build the concepts we use to make sense of what we feel.
In adults, labeling the emotion shown in negative images, a process known as affect labeling, reduced the response of the amygdala and other limbic regions (Lieberman et al., 2007), and Torre and Lieberman (2018) regard it as a form of implicit emotion regulation. Because that study was conducted in a laboratory and with adults, it does not support the claim that naming an emotion “switches off” a child’s fear (Lieberman et al., 2007). Distinguishing precisely between similar emotions, what is known as emotional granularity, is associated with less use of harmful strategies in the face of intense distress (Kashdan et al., 2015), and this ability declines from childhood to adolescence before rising again (Nook et al., 2018).
What a Child Learns From How We Talk
Words and Explanations: Making Sense of Feelings
In a classic study, children who participated more in family conversations about feelings at age 3 were better at understanding other people’s emotions at age 6, regardless of their verbal ability (Dunn et al., 1991). A meta-analysis including 2,298 children under age 7 found a significant relationship between parents’ mental state talk and children’s understanding of emotions and beliefs, a relationship that was stronger when parents talked about what someone thinks (Tompkins et al., 2018).
Which Emotions Seem Allowed
Gottman et al. (1996) distinguished between adults who see their children’s negative emotions as an opportunity for closeness and teaching and adults who tend to dismiss them. Parents’ negative reactions to those emotions have been associated with greater negative emotionality and lower social competence in children (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Overall, emotion socialization practices are associated with child conduct problems, although the effects are small and more pronounced in younger children (Johnson et al., 2017).
How an Emotion Is Handled
Hiding what we feel is not always protective: When parents who had just been through a stressful situation were asked to hide their emotions from their 7- to 11-year-old children, the interactions were less warm and less engaged (Waters et al., 2020). According to Halberstadt and Eaton (2002), expressing more is not always better either, because the relationship between negative family expressiveness and children’s emotion understanding proved complex, partly taking the shape of an inverted U.
Reading the World Through Adults
From very early on, babies look to adults’ expressions to interpret ambiguous situations, a process called social referencing that Morris et al. (2007) include among the forms of observational learning. In the classic visual cliff experiment, 74% of 1-year-olds crossed toward their mother when she showed joy, and none did so when she showed fear (Sorce et al., 1985).
Gender Messages
Some adults attend differently to girls’ and boys’ emotions: In a study of 60 families, fathers paid more attention to their daughters’ “submissive” emotions at preschool age and, in the early school years, to their sons’ “disharmonious” emotions (Chaplin et al., 2005). In another study, mothers and fathers talked more about emotions when recalling sad episodes with their daughters than with their sons (Fivush et al., 2000). Even so, a meta-analysis of 3,649 participants found no differences in how much mothers talk about emotions with daughters versus sons, so the differences seem to lie more in which emotions receive attention (Aznar & Tenenbaum, 2020; Chaplin et al., 2005; Fivush et al., 2000).
Talking Afterward: The Value of Remembering Together
Elaborative reminiscing means talking afterward about shared experiences in a detailed, emotional, and collaborative way, and it has been linked to better autobiographical memory, stronger language skills, and a deeper understanding of oneself and others (Fivush et al., 2006; Salmon & Reese, 2016). According to Salmon and Reese (2016), these conversations encourage children to put their experiences into words and are within reach of every family, although they still need to be studied across diverse cultures. A dinnertime question such as “Do you remember when your drawing got torn? How did you feel? What helped you?” follows that style.
When Adults Argue
The emotional security hypothesis proposes that conflict between adults affects children through their concern about feeling secure in the family (Davies & Cummings, 1994). Not all conflicts weigh the same: In a study using recorded scenes, children experienced unresolved anger between adults as much more negative than resolved anger (Cummings et al., 1989). That is why, according to Grych and Fincham (1990), it can help to explain to the child what happened, for example by saying, “Yesterday we had a big argument; we’ve talked it through, we worked it out, and it wasn’t your fault,” because the impact of conflict depends in part on how the child interprets it.
Strategies to Use at Home
These ideas are guidelines, not recipes, because emotion socialization depends on each child and on each family’s cultural context (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Friedlmeier et al., 2011). A first strategy is to name the emotion before correcting the behavior, which combines two components of emotion coaching (putting into words what the child feels and setting limits), as in “You’re really angry because the game is over; you can’t hit, but you can tell me you’re furious” (Gottman et al., 1996). It also helps when adults talk about their own emotions, for example, “I got home stressed; I’m going to take a moment to breathe, and then we’ll play,” because the child then sees how someone recognizes and manages what they feel (Morris et al., 2007). Reading stories together offers another opportunity, since asking what each character thinks and feels brings verbs such as think or believe into play, and mothers’ use of these verbs during reading was linked to children’s better understanding of mental states later on (Adrián et al., 2007). Finally, according to Tronick (1989), repairing after a bad moment with phrases such as “I yelled at you, and that wasn’t okay; I’m sorry” follows a principle observed from infancy: Healthy development is associated with mismatches that get repaired.
Instead of… | Try… |
“You’re okay, don’t cry.” | “You got scared. I’m here with you.” |
“Boys don’t cry.” | “It’s okay to cry when something hurts.” |
“Come on, it’s not a big deal.” | “This matters to you. Tell me what happened.” |
In a meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials, programs that teach these practices improved both parents’ responses and young children’s emotional competence (England-Mason et al., 2023), although their direct effect on children’s emotion regulation has received little attention (England-Mason & Gonzalez, 2020). What is considered appropriate to express varies across cultures and has been little studied outside the United States (Friedlmeier et al., 2011); in a study of Latina mothers in the United States, for example, respeto (respect) was one of the core values they sought to pass on (Calzada et al., 2010).
When to Seek Professional Help
All children get sad, anxious, irritable, or aggressive at times, and in most cases these are normal developmental phases (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024). Help is worth considering if behaviors or emotions last a few weeks or more, cause distress for the child or the family, or interfere with school, home life, or friendships, and it should be sought immediately if the behavior is dangerous or the child talks about wanting to hurt themselves or someone else. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (2024), a good first step is to talk with the people who see the child often, such as their teachers, and with the pediatrician, who can refer the child to a mental health professional experienced in evaluating children.
A Conversation That Lasts for Years
No adult responds calmly every time, and there is no need to: Healthy development is associated with mismatches that get repaired, not with perfect interactions (Tronick, 1989). What children learn is built through conversations repeated over the years (Dunn et al., 1991; Fivush et al., 2006), and talking about what we feel shows them that emotions can be named, understood, and regulated in the company of others (Morris et al., 2007).
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