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Responsive parenting that is attuned to infants’ needs helps infants develop skills in emotion regulation, especially in managing negative emotions like anxiety, as well as their physiological correlates, such as accelerated heart rate (Feldman et al., 2011). For example, sensitive responses coupled with soft vocalizations aid 3-month-old infants in regulating distress (Spinelli & Mesman, 2018). Likewise, when mothers responded promptly to their 2-month-old infants’ cries, these same infants, at 4 months of age, cried for shorter durations, were better able to manage their emotions, and stopped crying more quickly than other infants (Jahromi & Stifter, 2007).

Parents help their infants learn to manage emotions through a variety of strategies, including direct intervention, modeling, selective reinforcement, control of the environment, verbal instruction, and touch (Waters, West, Karnilowicz, & Mendes, 2017). These strategies change as the infants grow older. For example, touching becomes a less common regulatory strategy with age, whereas vocalizing and distracting techniques increase (Meléndez, 2005). When mothers provide guidance in helping infants regulate their emotions, the infants tend to engage in distraction and mother-oriented strategies, such as seeking help, during frustrating events.

Parent–infant interactions undergo continuous transformations as infants develop. For example, infants’ growing motor skills influence their interactions with parents, as well as their socioemotional development. Crawling, creeping, and walking introduce new challenges to parent–infant interaction and socioemotional growth (Adolph & Franchak, 2017). As crawling begins, parents and caregivers respond with happiness and pride, positive emotions that encourage infants’ exploration. As infants gain motor competence, they wander further from parents (Thurman & Corbetta, 2017). Crawling increases a toddler’s capability to attain goals—a capability that, while often satisfying to the toddler, may involve hazards.

Responsive parenting helps infants learn to manage their emotions and self-regulate.

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As infants become more mobile, emotional outbursts become more common. Parents report that advances in locomotion are accompanied by increased frustration as toddlers attempt to move in ways that often exceed their abilities or are not permitted by parents (Clearfield, 2011; Pemberton Roben et al., 2012). When mothers recognize the dangers posed to toddlers by objects such as houseplants, vases, and electrical appliances, they sharply increase their expressions of anger and fear, often leading to fear and frustration in their toddlers. At this stage, parents actively monitor toddlers’ whereabouts, protect them from dangerous situations, and expect them to comply—a dynamic that is often a struggle, amounting to a test of wills. At the same time, these struggles help the child to begin to develop a grasp of mental states in others that are different from his or her own.

Changes in emotional expression and regulation are dynamic because the changing child influences the changing parent. In particular, mothers and infants systematically influence and regulate each other’s emotions and behaviors. Mothers regulate infant emotional states by interpreting their emotional signals, providing appropriate arousal, and reciprocating and reinforcing infant reactions. Infants regulate their mother’s emotions through their receptivity to her initiations and stimulation and by responding to her emotions (Bornstein, Hahn, Suwalsky, & Haynes, 2011; Bornstein, Suwalsky, & Breakstone, 2012). By experiencing a range of emotional interactions—times when their emotions mirror those of their caregivers and times when their emotions are different from those of their caregivers—infants learn how to transform negative emotions into neutral or positive emotions and regulate their own emotional states (Guo, Leu, Barnard, Thompson, & Spieker, 2015).