From birth children find themselves in intense emotional relationships that provide a rich natural laboratory in which they learn about themselves and others. My research focuses on understanding how children construct an understanding of the self, others, and relationships in the context of close relationships with others. Relationships provide influences on children that are both broad (e.g., warmth) and specific (e.g., parent-child discourse) and that interact to determine children’s outcomes (Laible, Thompson, & Froimson, 2014). For example, the security inherent in the relationship supports the child’s engagement in discourse (especially surrounding negatively charged events), which influences the impact of this discourse on the child’s moral development (Laible & Panfile, 2009; Laible & Murphy, 2014). This suggests that socialization practices are only meaningful within their broader relational context and that the influence of specific relational processes depends on the broader quality of the relationship within which they are embedded. Thus, my program of research has focused on trying to understand how both broad relational qualities (such as warmth and security) and more specific relational process (such as discourse surrounding emotion) interact to produce children’s emotional and moral understanding, beliefs about others, and prosocial behavior.
My current research focuses on two major lines. The first examines socialization of emotion and morality in the context of mother-child conversations and factors that predict the quality of those conversations. For example, we are studying how economic risk shapes children’s early relational experiences with parents and in turn how these experiences influence the dyad’s subsequent communication at the end of middle childhood In this work, we are taking a family stress perspective that examines how economic stress impacts maternal mental health and maternal investment in quality parenting. In addition, however, we are also embedding children’s self-regulation into the family stress model to understand how economic risk and maternal mental health also shapes children’s regulatory capacities. We are then exploring how the intersection of parenting and children’s self-regulation predicts high quality conflict communication in mother-child dyads (i.e., perspective taking, control, intersubjectivity, guilt induction). Importantly, we plan to examine whether the process involved in predicting discourse (and parenting and self-regulation) are the same in different ethnic/racial groups (e.g., European Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans).
The second current line of research is aimed at examining how children learn to extend empathic and prosocial behaviors to diverse individuals (i.e., to expand their circle of moral regard), which is an important characteristic of altruistic individuals. Prosocial behaviors are extended toward diverse groups of people has obvious implications for an individual’s sense of responsibility, compassion, and later humanitarian conduct. The notion of moral extensivity in young children has received little attention by researchers. The limited relevant work has demonstrated that children show implicit and explicit racial biases by as early as 3-5 years of age and that young children believe that others feel more positive about, and more of an obligation to helping in-group members rather than out-group members. It is important to study the early emergence of biases toward racial/ethnic outgroup members as well as the factors that predict racial biases and the consequences of those biases for social behaviors. Thus, in collaboration with a number of colleagues (Drs. Tracy Spinrad, Nancy Eisenberg, Gus Carlo, Jeff Liew), we’ve been exploring the development of prosocial and empathic biases in young children (Sprinrad et al., 2023; Laible et al., 2021).
We have been particularly interested in understanding how White children and adolescents acquire attitudes and beliefs about ethnic minorities from parents and how those beliefs predict discriminatory versus compassionate behaviors towards ethnic/racial outgroups. Although children get messages about ethnic and racial outgroups from multiple sources (e.g., peers and media) (Tukachinsky et al., 2015; Wittenbrink & Henly, 1996), parents are one of the most important socializers of their children’s attitudes about racial/ethnic groups (Aboud & Amato, 2001; Allport, 1954). We are examining how traditional parenting styles (e.g., support and control) intersect with color conscious socialization practices to influence children and adolescents’ development of racial attitudes and prosocial behavior towards ethnic minorities. We have also begun to explore how adolescents from conservative families acquire White Nationalist beliefs in the context of socialization by parents.