ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the role of caregivers in the socialization of emotion and emotion regulation from a biobehavioral perspective and describes the implications of such a perspective for education. Although considerable research has sought to understand the relations between parental behavior and a range of child developmental outcomes, much of this work has been conducted at a very broad level of analysis. Psychobiological theory and research point to the need for models of caregiving that offer greater specificity regarding processes that may be implicated in the effects of these relationships (cf. Calkins, 2010). Recent animal work and some human work has focused more on the proximal mechanisms through which caregivers influence the development of children’s emotion regulation skills. Such work is likely to make significant contributions for both basic and applied work that is focused on the processes through which parents provide children with the necessary emotion management skills that will facilitate the transition to school and school functioning in childhood and adolescence.
