The Maternal Role On Emotional Competence Development of Early Childhood

Abstract

Emotional competence is a multi-dimensional construct, consists of the skills to recognize and understand emotions, express emotions appropriately, and regulate emotions. The emotional competence develops through social and emotional interactions between children and their primary caregivers, especially mother. This article aims to discuss the research findings on maternal role in children's emotional competence development. A number of research articles that examine the roles of mother on children's emotional competence obtained through online search system of electronic research articles, namely Proquest, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The keywords used in the search were mother, maternal roles, emotional competence, emotion knowledge, emotion expression, emotion regulation, and children. A total of 20 articles were reviewed through screening steps based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The findings show that mother plays a significant role to emotional competence of children through attachment, maternal emotional socialization, maternal emotion regulation, and maternal parenting. The maternal role is also related with cultural frames.