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Parental and Peer Contributions to the Emotional Support Skills of the Child: From Whom Do Children Learn to Express Support?

With advancing age, children increasingly turn to peers for emotional support, and the child's ability to provide sensitive emotional support to peers becomes an increasingly important predictor of social acceptance. Although individual differences in emotional support skills become evident in early childhood, little is known about the social experiences that lead some children to become more skillful providers of emotional support than others. This study assessed the influence of two socialization agents, parents and peers, on individual differences in children's emotional support skills. Participants included 51 first- and third-grade children, their mothers, and their classmates. Assessments obtained from each child of three skills related to the provision of emotional support included the following: comforting skill, affective perspective-taking ability, and social perspective-taking ability. Measures of comforting skill were obtained from both the child's mother and three classmates with whom each child frequently interacted. Correlational and regression analyses indicate that the comforting skills of mothers and peers independently contribute to the child's capacity to produce sensitive comforting messages. In addition, peers' comforting skills were significant predictors of the child's affective perspective-taking ability. The results indicate different theoretical mechanisms may link the behavior of parents and peers to the social competencies of the child.