Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic and its’ sequalae, both behavioral, such as lock-downs, and emotional, such as increased anxiety levels, underscored the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development (Hamilton & Gross, 2021; Salmon, 2021). Research on effective emotion socialization is more urgent than ever. In this article we focus on one particular avenue of emotion socialization, mother-child reminiscing, which has been shown to be both critical to outcome and amenable to intervention (Salmon & Reese, 2015). Stemming from the sociocultural developmental theory of autobiographical memory, several decades of research has substantiated that mothers who reminisce with their preschool children in more highly elaborative ways, providing coherent details, and labeling and resolving emotion experience, have children who develop better socioemotional skills. Mother-child reminiscing1 can be conceptualized as an aspect of parent-child discussion about emotional experience, a key component of Eisenberg and colleagues (Eisenberg, Spinrad & Eggum, 2010) model of emotion socialization; we contend that autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience is a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding. In the first part of this article, we provide the broader theoretical framework for maternal reminiscing style. We then focus more specifically on reminiscing about emotional experiences and relations to children's emotion development. Based on these findings, we describe intervention studies that have coached mothers to be more elaborative during reminiscing conversations in both typically and atypically developing populations. We end with some reflections on what we know and what future research might focus on.

2. The sociocultural developmental theory of autobiographical memory

2.1. The emergence of autobiographical memories and narratives. Autobiographical memory, loosely defined, is memories of personal experiences linked to a sense of self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Fivush, 2010, 2019). The gradual emergence of autobiographical memory across childhood and adolescence depends on multiple neurological, cognitive and sociocultural factors (Nelson & Fivush, 2004); in this review, we focus on the sociocultural context within which children learn the narrative forms and functions of autobiographical memory as a foundation for emotional understanding. Children begin referring to personal past experiences virtually as soon as they begin talking, at about 16- to 18-months of age, but these early references are fleeting, often just a word or two, and mostly about relatively recent events (Uehara, 2015). For example, when the mother comes home from work, the toddler might say “swings” and the mother might ask “Oh, did you go on the swings at the park today? Did you have fun?” In this prototypical type of interchange we already see several things that are defining of autobiographical memory.

First, memories of personal lived experience are a ubiquitous part of everyday conversation (Boyd, 2018). Around a typical family dinner conversation, references to personally experienced events occur every 5 min Bohanek et al. (2009). An experience that evokes even mild emotions will be shared with someone else through conversation within 48 h (Rime, 2007). Second, and related to the first, memories of the past are socially constructed through narrative forms into coherent accounts. As we discuss past experiences with others, we re-evaluate, re-interpret and re-organize our memories into a coherent story with a beginning, middle and end, one that is validated through negotiation in the telling and listening (McLean, 2015; Pasupathi & Billitteri, 2015). Particularly within families, as family members reminisce about their shared past, as well as their individual experiences, these memories take on a more canonical narrative form that provides structure and coherence (Pratt & Fiese, 2004). The narrative form of memory sharing moves beyond a simple description of what happened, from what Bruner (1991) calls the landscape of action, to include the landscape of consciousness. Narratives include internal reactions, the thoughts and emotions of both the protagonist and others, interwoven with interpretations about motivation and intention. Thus, narratives provide a canonical structure for organizing and understanding emotional experiences in ways that shape emotional regulation and resolution.

Early in development – as soon as children begin talking – parents, usually mothers, provide most of the content and structure of these co-constructed autobiographical narratives, with the very young child simply adding confirmation (often with just a head nod) or a word or two. In this way, mothers provide a scaffold to guide their children into the forms and functions of reminiscing (Fivush, 2019). Children quickly become more adept at reminiscing, and by age 3, children are full participants in these conversations, bringing the past up as a topic of conversation, and providing a good bit of accurate detail both about what happened and what they were thinking and feeling. Yet, mothers still provide much of the structure to create coherence from the myriad bits and to integrate the external world of action with the internal world of thoughts and emotions, as this example between 4-year-old Porter and his mother (this and all examples are pseudonyms and are from Fivush, 2019; the sample was European-descent, broadly middle-class US families) about the previous weekend's activities:

Mother: Who was keeping you (from going to the museum)?

Porter: Alan (Porter's younger brother).

Mother: Alan kinda overslept on his nap, right?

Porter: Yeah.

Mother: And by the time he got up it was late, so we didn't have time to really get lunch before.

Porter: And I had an accident.

Mother: You had an accident. You're right. And we didn't wanna go to (the museum) if you were having an accident. And do you know what else there was?

Porter: What?

Mother: What'd Daddy really want to do yesterday?

Porter: I don't know.

Mother: What did Daddy do all afternoon?

Porter: Daddy wanted to watch football.

Mother: Daddy really wanted to watch the football game didn't Daddy? (Chuckles) Was it kinda fun watchin’ with Daddy?

Porter: Yeah.

Mother: Yeah, but it made us sad that we didn't get to go.

As we see in this excerpt, Porter is an active co-constructor of this narrative, but it is the mother who provides the narrative thread to weave it all into a coherent story. Of particular interest, the mother ends the story with an emotional coda that sums up the meaning of the event. Note, too, that the mother expresses the complexity of emotional experience, in that this was both fun and sad at the same time. As parents and children engage in this kind of joint reminiscing, children are learning to organize their personal memories within culturally canonical narrative forms that provide a framework for understanding and evaluating personal experience in emotional contexts (Nelson & Fivush, 2004).

2.2. Maternal reminiscing style

Whereas all families across multiple cultures studied engage in parent-child reminiscing, 30 years of research has also established substantial and enduring individual differences (see Fivush, 2019, for a review). Some mothers, such as Porter's, are highly elaborative, providing details, asking questions, integrating their child's responses into an ongoing story. Other, less elaborative mothers, ask fewer, more repetitive questions, do not pull the child's responses into the thread of the story and do not provide a coherent narrative. Although there are broad cultural differences in maternal elaborative reminiscing, across multiple cultures studied, children of more highly elaborative mothers develop more detailed and coherent memories of their own experiences (Schroder et al., 2013; Tougu et al., 2012; Wang, 2016, 2021), and these effects are still evident through adolescence (Reese, Jack & White, 2010). Moreover, it is not simply that more elaborative reminiscers talk more overall; mothers who reminisce in more elaborative ways do not necessarily talk more during routine care activities, book reading or free play (Haden & Fivush, 1996). Thus reminiscing seems to be a special context, in which mothers have specific goals of creating a shared history and helping their child learn about who they are through structuring their past experiences (Kulkofsky, Wang & Koh, 2009). Importantly, it has been shown that maternal elaborative reminiscing predicts more detailed and coherent child narratives even when controlling for child language, temperament and executive function skills (Fivush et al., 2016). Further, children who narrate more detailed and coherent autobiographical memories show a more differentiated sense of self, higher self-esteem, and better emotion regulation skills (Fivush, 2019). Thus, maternal elaborative reminiscing is pivotal in positive child outcome.

3. Reminiscing about emotional events

Highly elaborative mothers co-construct detailed coherent narratives with their preschoolers, and they also integrate emotions into these reminiscing conversations. More specifically, through reminiscing, mothers help their preschoolers understand the experience of emotion, as well as the causes and consequences of emotion. When discussing positive happy experiences, mothers tend to focus on the experience itself, helping children to relive and savor these experiences (Fivush, Berlin, McDermott Sales, Mennuti-Washburn & Cassidy, 2003), as well as to create a shared history that helps cement positive emotional bonds (Kulkofsky et al., 2009). But when discussing more negative or challenging emotional experiences, such as sadness, anger and fear, mothers turn their focus to helping their children understand the causes of these experiences and possible resolutions, as can be seen in this excerpt between 4-year-old Rachel and her mother discussing when Rachel's best friend, Sheila moved away:

Mother: Well, one thing that made you really sad is when your best friend Sheila moved away, right?

Rachel: (nods yes)

Mother: Yeah, and did we watch all her things go on the moving truck? Uh-huh, and do you remember why she had to move away?

Rachel: …(some off-topic comments)…Because Sheila's Father had to work.

Mother: Sheila's Father was going to start working at a new job…And do you still miss Sheila when you think about it?

Rachel: (nods yes)

Mother: Yes?

Rachel: Yes.

Mother: It makes you sad. Doesn't it?

Rachel: (nods yes)

Mother: But is she still your friend even far away?

Rachel: (nods yes)

Mother: Yes! What can you do even though she's far away?

Rachel: Give her a happy letter with a (drawing) on it.

Mother: Give her a happy letter, right, and we have a drawing, don't we?

Multiple aspects of this conversation are intriguing. First, it is apparent that mother and daughter have discussed this event previously, suggesting that Rachel is still having emotional difficulties with this loss. Second, the mother helps Rachel express her emotional experience and validates it before moving the conversation into a possible resolution. Notice also that the mother expresses that relationships can continue even long-distance, perhaps helping Rachel develop deeper understanding of relationship maintenance through maintaining emotional bonds through time. Finally, note that the resolution does not dismiss Rachels’ feelings of sadness, but provides her with a way to cope with these feelings. In all of these ways, Rachel's mother is helping Rachel place her emotional experience in a narrative context that describes the feeling itself, the causes and a resolution.

Obviously, children are not learning about emotion and emotion regulation in any single conversation, but across hundreds of conversations across the preschool years. Mothers and children discuss various kinds of emotional events and children are internalizing narrative forms that help them understand and regulate their emotions. And more elaborative mothers do this more successfully than less elaborative mothers.

3.1. Elaborative reminiscing and emotion understanding and regulation

Across their early years and beyond, children acquire critical skills to understand emotion; that is, they become able to recognize and label facial expressions associated with emotions, and specify appropriate causes of emotional experience (Denham et al., 2003). Children who have developmentally-appropriate emotion understanding navigate their worlds more effectively than children whose understanding is impoverished, reflected in higher quality relationships with their peers and fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties (Denham et al., 2003; Salmon, O'Kearney, Reese & Fortune, 2016). Also crucial to social and to academic success is children's ability to modulate the intensity and valence of their emotional experiences such as frustration, anxiety, and disappointment - that is, their emotion regulation skill (Moffitt et al., 2011; Perry, Dollar, Calkins, Keane & Shanahan, 2018).

How mothers reminisce about the past with their children is related to their children's emotion understanding. For example, mothers who are more elaborative and who explain the causes of emotional experiences have children with stronger emotion understanding, over and above the total amount of talk about emotions in the conversation (e.g., Laible & Song, 2006; Van Bergen & Salmon, 2010). But valence also matters. As we have discussed earlier, negative experiences are an especially rich context for children's learning about difficult emotions, particularly, when the parent themselves can engage sensitively with their child (Reese, Meins, Fernyhough & Centifanti, 2019). Indeed, higher maternal elaboration during a conversation about a negative experience, such as an instance of the child's non-compliant behavior, is more strongly related to emotion understanding both at the time and subsequently than discussion about a more positive experience (Laible, 2011, 2013).

Highly elaborative reminiscing conversations between mothers and their young children are also related to the children's ability to regulate or manage their emotions effectively (Levya & Nolivos, 2015; Leyva et al., 2020). For example, in one recent study, when mothers engaged in highly elaborative conversations in which they labeled and discussed the causes and consequences of their child's negative emotions, their children were able to better manage an emotion-eliciting task assessing their self-regulation one year later (Wu et al., 2022). Yet mothers’ approach to positive emotions is also important. In particular, mothers who tend to label and explain both positive and negative emotions in their reminiscing conversations have preschool children with fewer internalizing symptoms (a marker of poorer self-regulation), relative to mothers who tend to focus only on negative emotions and to dismiss positive emotions or who do not focus on emotions at all (Hernandez, Smith, Day, Neal & Dunsmore, 2018).

3.2. Why reminiscing is a critical conversational context

That highly elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to higher levels of child emotion understanding and regulation is clear. There are at least four interrelated reasons why elaboration during reminiscing might be such a critical conversational context. First, reminiscing underscores children's own lived experience. Children do not have to imagine or empathize with another, as in book reading; when they are reminiscing about personal experiences, children are essentially re-living their own experience. Second, even though they may be re-living the experience, reminiscing still allows some distance. Children are no longer in the heat of the moment, and therefore may be in a better position to reflect on and evaluate their emotional experiences. Third, almost by definition, these are experiences which are personally significant and thus children are attentive and motivated. Finally, in reminiscing, mothers and children can select which events and which aspects of events to focus on that might be most meaningful for the child. In Rachel's narrative, we saw the mother focusing on validating and resolving feelings of sadness about the loss of a relationship. In the following excerpt from 4-year-old Zoe, the mother focuses on thunderstorms, which are a recurring scary event for her daughter:

Mother: And what happens when there's a big thunder and lightning storm?

Zoe: I'd want to be with my mom and dad (whispering)

Mother: Yes, you want to be with your mom and dad. And what happens if you're sleeping and there's a big bunch of thunder in the middle of the night? What happens sometimes?

Zoe: Scared

Mother: Scared. Do you tremble like that? Do you shake? Huh? Then what do you do?

Zoe: I get up and go to my mom and dad (whispering).

Mother: You get up and go to your mom and dad. And what do we do?

Zoe: Say don't worry

Mother: Say don't worry. Do we hold you?

Zoe: (nods yes)

Mother: Yes, does holding help when you're scared?

Zoe: (nods yes)

Mother: Yes.

In this excerpt, the mother both provides descriptive details to give words to the feeling of being scared, perhaps in order to help Zoe better label and control her bodily emotions, but then immediately moves to resolving the emotional upheaval. Note that Zoe is clearly re-living the experience; she is whispering and hesitant throughout the conversation. Different than resolving sadness, Zoe's mother focuses on emotional and physical reassurance of her child. Again, we see that the mother does not dismiss the emotional reaction, but we also see differential resolutions appropriate to the particular emotional experience. Thus, reminiscing allows mothers and children to explore children's lived emotional experience in a more removed, and hence safer, context and co-constructing the narrative provides children with forms of understanding and labeling their emotional experiences as well as appropriate ways to cope with challenging emotions.

4. Interventions to increase maternal elaborative reminiscing

Children who have problems understanding and regulating their emotions tend to have a raft of psychological difficulties, and, conversely, children experiencing psychological difficulties of various kinds tend to have poorer emotion understanding and regulation skill (Salmon et al., 2016). For example, children with significant behavioral (conduct) problems display restricted emotional expression, problems appreciating and responding to others’ emotions, and dysregulation of negative emotions (O'Kearney, Salmon, Liwag, Fortune & Dawel, 2017). Child maltreatment, too, has pervasive negative effects which include difficulties in identifying and understanding emotions, problems regulating their high levels of negative emotional distress, while also experiencing low levels of positive emotion (Lavi, Katz, Ozer & Gross, 2019; Warmingham, Duprey, Handley, Rogosch & Cicchetti, 2022). Coaching parents to engage in elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing is potentially a pathway by which children's difficulties in these crucial areas can be remediated, and, given the pervasiveness of conversation in everyday life, one that is available to all parents.

Typically, in intervention studies, one group of mothers is coached to engage in highly elaborative (and often emotion-rich) reminiscing whereas a comparison control group are either engaged in another “control” task or is simply followed up. Before and after their coaching (or control) experience, mothers and children are recorded engaging in conversations about the past and the key child skills of interest (e.g., emotion understanding, regulation) are assessed. Information is gathered about other potential explanations for any differences between groups after coaching (e.g., maternal education, initial elaborative style, child language skill). Coaching might include video demonstration of another mother engaging in a conversation about the past in which she invites her child's input via open-ended questions, elaborates on her child's response, and labels and discusses the causes and consequences of emotion (e.g., Valentino, Comas, Nuttall & Thomas, 2013; Van Bergen, Salmon, Dadds & Allen, 2009). Coached parents may also be given feedback on their emerging skills

From a practical perspective, coaching intervention studies enable us to answer crucial questions. Can mothers of typically- or atypically-developing children be coached to alter their reminiscing style? If so, are these related to benefits for their children? Importantly, too, because coaching intervention studies adopt an experimental design which aims to alter maternal style, they enable us to establish whether reminiscing style plays a causal role in children's socioemotional outcomes. In these ways, we can test important theoretical ideas, in turn providing a strong foundation for developing interventions with high-risk mothers and children.

4.1. Intervention studies with typically-developing children and their mothers

Research with typically-developing mothers and their young children gives us confidence that mothers can change their reminiscing style in an enduring way even following brief intervention, that their children's style changes too, and the children's socioemotional skills benefit across time.

For example, mothers of 29-month old children were randomly assigned to engage in an elaborative reminiscing coaching condition that invovled 4 one-hour sessions with a female research assistant in which they were provided “tips for talking” that included asking open-ended questions, praising chidlren's responses and following in with related responses. They did indeed alter their reminiscing style to become more elaborative from baseline assessment to post-training assessment relative to mothers in a control condition (Reese & Newcombe, 2007; Reese et al., 2010). In follow-up long-term assessments at 44 months of age and again at 11 years and at 15 years of age, children of mothers who had been coached displayed more elaborative memories with their parents and independently (Reese, Macfarlane, McAnally, Robertson & Taumoepeau, 2020). There are also indications that this brief intervention boosted young people's emotion labeling and regulation: across adolescence until young adulthood, they included more negative emotion references in their own memory narratives and reported better mental health, relative to their peers (Marshall & Reese, 2022; Mitchell & Reese, 2022).

Moreover, coaching mothers in elaborative emotion-rich reminiscing alters young children's emotion understanding (Van Bergen et al., 2009). Specifically, mothers of children ages 3- to 8 years were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to draw their children into conversations about past emotional experiences in a series of 4 30-minute sessions and to label emotions and discuss their causes and consequences. Relative to a condition in which mothers were encouraged to follow their children's lead in play, by the end of coaching both the mothers and children made more high elaborative utterances and emotion references in their conversations, and 6 months later, the children demonstrated better understanding of the causes of emotions.

4.2. Intervention studies with atypically-developing children and their mothers

Do mothers of atypically developing children reminisce about the past differently from other mothers? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they do. For example, mothers of children with significant behavioral (conduct) problems engage in lower levels of elaborative reminiscing compared to mothers whose children were not experiencing behavioral problems. Mothers of children with behavioral problems also make more references to negative emotions (but similar levels of positive emotions as the community sample) (Van Bergen, Salmon & Dadds, 2018). Mothers who have been established to maltreat their children (relative to non-maltreating mothers) not only engage in less elaboration but are also less sensitive in supporting their child's emotions during reminiscing conversations (Valentino et al., 2015, 2019).

But coaching interventions can be effective even in these more challenging contexts. For example, when the mothers of children with conduct problems were randomly assigned to either emotion-rich reminiscing training or a child-led play control condition, immediately after the intervention, the mothers who had received reminiscing coaching and their children had increased their elaborations and references to emotion when talking together about the past. Coaching involved 4 30-minute sessions; during the first session, mothers watched a breif video and went through a training booklet with a research assistant. At each of the next three sessions, mothers practiced and were provided feedback. In the control condition, mothers were encouraged to engage in child-directed play. Interestingly, children's behavioral problems decreased in both conditions, perhaps because all mothers had also received abbreviated training in managing their child's non-compliant behavior (Van Bergen et al., 2009). In a related study, emotion rich reminiscing was included as one session in a series of 6 intervention sessions with mothers of children with conduct disorders who were randomly assigned to coaching versus a control condition in which mothers were encouraged to engage in child-directed play. Again, comparing baseline to post-intervention assessments, children of mothers with training in reminiscing showed decreased behavior problems (Salmon, Dadds, Allen & Hawes, 2009). Moreover, when the findings for this study and a community sample of mothers whose children were not experiencing behavioral problems were compared, they showed that despite their pre-existing differences, mothers in both the clinical and community groups responded to the intervention to a similar extent, increasing their levels of elaboration and references to positive and negative emotions (Van Bergen et al., 2009).

Yet we need to bring caution to understanding how emotions are managed within these complex relationships given the high levels of dysregulated negative affect that can dominate their verbal exchanges. Indeed, mothers’ reminiscing about negative emotional experiences with children with behavioral problems can be associated with poorer child understanding of emotion causes and emotion regulation skill (Pate et al., 2020). The quality of reminiscing – its sensitivity, affective tone, reciprocity, and validation of the child's responses - is crucial (McDonnell, Lawson, Speidel, Fondren & Valentino, 2022).

We now know, however, from quite a body of research, that mothers who have maltreated their young children can also alter their reminiscing style to become more elaborative and make more emotion references (Valentino et al., 2013). For example, in a RCT, in which intervention consisted of 6 weekly one-hour sessions using the “tips for talking” training, both maltreating and non-maltreating mothers increased their elaborative reminiscing and, again, for both groups, children showed higher levels of emotion understanding from baseline to post-intervention assessment. Importantly, the intervention led to significantly better elaboration and sensitive guidance relative to two control conditions, a community standard condition receiving case management and written parenting information; and a demographically-matched group of non-maltreating families (Valentino et al., 2015, 2019).

Especially promising, these treatment gains were maintained over time (Valentino et al., 2015; Valentino, Hibel, Speidel, Fondren & Ugarte, 2021). That is, mothers who were taught to engage in more elaborative and sensitive reminiscing sustained their increased elaborative reminiscing over the next six months. Further, there were positive effects of the intervention on their children's levels of a stress hormone (cortisol) across the following year (relative to the control conditions). This improvement in children's self-regulation was attributable to changes in mothers’ elaborative reminiscing. That is, reminiscing coaching improved children's self-regulation skill via its positive effect on maternal elaboration.

In summary, the findings of enduring positive benefits of reminiscing coaching for young children with complex socioemotional difficulties and their parents are heartening.

These intervention coaching studies provide the clearest evidence yet that elaborative reminiscing is key to children's developing socioemotional skills, including their understanding and regulation of emotions. The findings clearly demonstrate that maternal elaboration is a critical mechanism of socioemotional development, providing a strong justification for developing interventions with at-risk children and their mothers (Holmes et al., 2018).

5. Implications, conclusions and future directions

Reviewing thirty years of research confirms that enduring individual differences in maternal reminiscing style are related to children's developing autobiographical narrative skills and to multiple aspects of emotion development. As we have argued here, these two skills are related; as children learn to construct more coherent narratives, they simultaneously learn how to integrate emotional experience, its causes, consequences and possible resolutions, into understanding lived experience. It is this complex interweaving of what happened in the world with the inner workings of the mind that helps children create coherent and regulated accounts of emotional experience. Mothers who are highly elaborative in scaffolding their children's’ emerging autobiographical narratives, weaving the internal and external worlds together, have children who come to tell more coherent narratives of their personal past, and also better understand and regulate their emotional experience.

Perhaps most promising, more recent research has extended these findings to mothers and children at risk. Even with a relatively brief intervention, mothers can be coached to become more elaborative and emotionally complex during reminiscing conversations with their children, and this is the case for both mothers and children with emotional challenges. However this research is still in early stages. Inevitably, a number of outstanding questions remain that point to future research directions, particularly with respect to coaching intervention studies. For example, what precise elements of reminiscing interventions are most effective? Are reminiscing coaching interventions even more effective if other skills, such as behavioral parenting skills, are included (e.g., Salmon et al., 2009) or do we risk overwhelming mothers who are already under considerable pressure (Salmon, Dittman, Sanders, Burson & Hammington, 2014)? Can coaching interventions improve socioemotional skill in other contexts, such as child anxiety? Can reminiscing coaching buffer children from the potential impacts of poorer maternal mental health? For example, mothers’ high elaborative emotion talk has been shown to be particularly important for children's socioemotional development when the mothers experienced depressive symptoms (Wu et al., 2022). Finally, should reminiscing coaching also explicitly focus on positive experiences: expressing positive emotions “oils the wheels” of young children's social interactions, yet difficulties regulating positive emotion are increasingly implicated in a range of psychological problems (Denham et al., 2003; Vanderlind, Millgram, Baskin-Sommers, Clark & Joormann, 2020).

Just as important, we need to examine the bidirectional influences between mothers and children during reminiscing. We know almost nothing about why some mothers may be more elaborative than others (Fivush, 2019), but we do know that children are active participants in creating their own developmental contexts. What is the transactional developmental pathway that leads to more highly elaborative reminiscing? And related to this, when we successfully coach mothers to be more elaborative, in what ways might that change not just the reminiscing context but other aspects of mother-child interactions and relationship quality? And, of course, we need more research on more culturally diverse populations. Research indicates that maternal elaboration is a critical individual difference in maternal reminiscing across multiple cultures, and more elaborative maternal reminiscing is related to more positive child outcomes across cultures (see Fivush, 2019, for a review), but we have little data on intervention studies with different cultural populations.

Whatever the answers to these important questions may be, what is clear is that mother-child reminiscing about every day, as well as more challenging emotional experiences, is a critical context for the socialization of emotion. 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.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of Competing Interest

There are no conflicts of interest