Unpacking ‘culture’: Caregiver socialization of emotion and child functioning in diverse families

Socialization of children’s emotions is implicated in a variety of child outcomes including children’s social and emotional competence, peer relations, self-esteem, and internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Recognizing the importance of culture, an emerging body of literature has examined caregiver socialization of children’s emotions in culturally diverse groups and has shown both similarities and variation in parental emotion-related socialization behaviors. Preliminary findings also suggest that caregiver emotion socialization behaviors that are associated with adaptive child outcomes in White middle-class families (with whom a bulk of the emotion socialization research is conducted) may not be related to adaptive child functioning in other cultural groups. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework that extends Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad’s (1998) model and unpacks aspects of culture that help explain the variation in caregiver emotion socialization processes and in the relation between caregiver emotion socialization and child socio-emotional functioning across cultural groups. Within the context of this framework, we systematically review published studies of caregiver emotion related socialization behaviors in culturally diverse families for children between preschool-age to adolescence, with a focus on their implication for child well-being. Gaps in the existing literature are identified, and directions for future research are outlined.