MOTHER-CHILD TALK ABOUT PAST EMOTIONS - RELATIONS OF MATERNAL LANGUAGE AND CHILD GENDER OVER TIME

Emotional understanding and expression is largely constructed in socio cultural contexts; thus examination of the ways in which parents talk about emotions with their young children is critical for understanding emotional socialisation. In this longitudinal research, 18 white, mid dle-class mothers and their preschool children discussed salient past events when the children were 40, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses r evealed that mothers talked more about emotions and talked about a gre ater variety of emotions with daughters than with sons. Mothers also f ocused more on negative emotions with daughters than with sons. Althou gh there were no gender differences between girls and boys at the begi nning of the study, by the last phase, girls talked more about emotion and about a greater variety of emotion than did boys and also initiat ed more emotion-related discussions than did boys. Results are discuss ed in relation to a growing body of evidence on gender and emotion acr oss the life span.