Conversations between parents and their children are a key pathway for the socialization of emotions in young children. Emotions displayed through parental conversations enable children to reconstruct the meaning of emotion and learn emotional values in cultural contexts. Gender influences parent–child interactions behaviorally and verbally. This study mainly aims to explore differences in parents’ use of emotional words and words in general, in addition to narrative styles and content, when conversing with their children regarding past emotional experiences. Accordingly, this study selected 30 boys and girls aged 5 years with medium-high language proficiencies with their parents; the average age of the children was 63 months (with an age range of 52–64 months). The researchers obtained parental consent to collect data on the young children’s language skills and conversations through four emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The parents received three instructions from the researchers before parent–child conversations: (1) limit the four emotional experiences to those jointly shared by parents and child, (2) avoid story narratives, and (3) discuss events that occurred within the previous two months. The goal was to ensure fresh parent–child memories to prevent emotional experiences deviating from the emotional theme (Wang, 2001; Fivush & Wang, 2005, Wang & Fivush, 2005). The researchers recorded emotional conversations between the parents and children after confirming that the parents had understood the instructions. The parents randomly determined the order of emotional events. After data collection, researchers gifted the parents with a preschool education magazine, picture books, and an NT$300 gift certificate.

After the data were converted into verbatim transcripts, the corpus was coded using the coding of Wang and Fivush based on three criteria. The first criterion was words and emotion words. Academia Sinica’s online word segmentation system was used to calculate the vocabulary size. Emotion words were calculated on the basis of (1) descriptive language that demonstrates understanding of the emotional state described, (2) emotional assessment of events, and (3) interjections that express emotions. The second criterion, narrative styles, included the following: (1) repetition, when parents repeat the child’s words without contributing any additional information but implying their understanding of the child’s emotions; (2) elaboration, when parents introduce a topic and revisit an event from a new perspective or provide new information based on a specific event, expressed through at least three consecutive parent–child conversations on emotional topics; and (3) clarification, when a parent and child have inconsistent understandings of an emotional event and engage in at least three elaborative conversations. The third criterion, narrative content, involved (1) emotional theme, when a child describes the origins of an emotional experience as personal feelings or interpersonal interactions, and (2) emotional regulation, when parents provide their child with concrete approaches for processing negative emotions. Furthermore, t tests, chi-squared tests, and two-way mixed analysis of variance were used to analyze the data.

No difference was observed between the fathers and mothers in terms of the quantity of words and emotional words used. This result suggests that fathers play an essential role in the emotional development process during early childhood and that we have underestimated fathers’ daily influence on children’s emotional development. In this study, the fathers were more emotionally expressive and fully discussed emotions during an emotional conversation with their children. This contradicts the stereotypical image of an untalkative father. Furthermore, the mothers used more emotion words with boys than with girls in emotional experiences involving fear. This was probably because the mothers believed that boys should learn to perceive the emotion of fear and express their feelings through words instead of suppressing the emotion of fear.

The results on narrative styles revealed that the mothers were more repetitive than the fathers when discussing emotional experiences involving happiness. Accordingly, the mothers effectively understood their children’s feelings of joy, and the children perceived that their mothers understood their feelings in their words. Compared with the mothers, the fathers more likely wanted to mold their children according to traditional gender roles and preserve the advantage of men in power and social status (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000); thus, the fathers more likely used elaborative styles to converse with their children in independent conversations. Denham et al. (2010) argued that fathers more likely respond to boys’ and girls’ emotions from the perspective of stereotypical gender roles. In this study, the fathers more often elaborated on boys’ fear, whereas the mothers elaborated more on boys’ sadness. This was because society expects boys to be brave and considers fear as inappropriate (Brody, 1999; Fischer & Mastead, 2000). Therefore, the fathers considered themselves as their son’s gender role models during independent conversations and believed that the boys must be fearless to take on great responsibilities when they grow up. By contrast, the mothers elaborated on their sons’ sadness possibly because they believed that boys might experience sadness when subjected to pressure in the future. Accordingly, elaborating on boys’ feelings of sadness during childhood enables them to observe, understand, and express the feelings in question at an early age.

The results on the narrative content demonstrated that when emotional experiences involved either happiness (e.g., joy from going out, getting food, and eating) or fear (e.g., fear of being lost, the dark, nightmares, and sleeping alone), the children mostly described emotions caused by personal feelings. When the emotional themes were sadness or anger, the children more likely expressed emotions caused by interpersonal interactions, such as “being separated from family,” “being punished by the grownups,” and “being bullied by siblings or toys being taken away.” The parents provided more methods of emotional regulation in response to a child’s feelings of anger; however, most parents did not provide a means of processing negative emotions.

The study findings suggest that parents and parenting educators should particularly focus on the unique influence of fathers on boys’ emotional development. They should affirm the special status of fathers in the socialization of emotions in young children and realize the pivotal role of fathers in the socialization of emotions in boys. Parents should provide concrete methods of emotional regulation during emotional conversations to teach children ways to regulate their negative emotions.

Future studies should further analyze differences in parents’ meanings of words and emotion words to understand the implications of vocabulary sizes. Future studies should investigate the percentage at which specific vocabulary or language forms are used by parents as well as the extent to which parents elaborate on the four emotions and children’s possible responses. This study concludes that mothers and fathers play key roles in emotional development during early childhood. However, the limited nature of the sample, comprising parents predominantly belonging to the upper middle class, affected further inferences. Only a few Taiwanese studies have been conducted on the topic in question. Our initial findings may serve as a reference for researchers interested in the further investigation of parent–child emotional conversations. Subsequent studies are thereby prompted to create a more comprehensive image of Taiwanese parent–child emotional conversations.