Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization

Background: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context. Purpose: Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding. Method: The authors provide a theoretical and empirical review of how maternal reminiscing style impacts specifically on emotion socialization in both typically and atypically developing children. Results: Individual differences in maternal reminiscing indicate that highly elaborative reminiscing is related to both better narrative skills and higher levels of emotion understanding and regulation both concurrently and longitudinally. Intervention studies indicate that mothers can be coached to be more elaborative during reminiscing and coaching leads to higher levels of emotion understating and regulation. Conclusions: Reminiscing about lived experience allows mothers and children to explore and examine emotions in personally meaningful situations that have real world implications for children's evolving emotion understanding.