Nursery World - Social skills 'learned by talk about feelings', study finds

The way mothers talk to their children when they are young has a lasting effect on their social skills, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Sussex found that children whose mothers talked to them about people's feelings, beliefs, wants and intentions, particularly between the ages of three and five, developed better social understanding than children whose mothers did not offer information about people's mental states.

The study, 'The Relation Between Parenting, Children's Social Understanding and Language', was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

It followed children aged three to 12, measuring their social understanding using interviews, questionnaires, assessments of social understanding, observation of mental state and talk between mothers and children.

In one part of the study researchers observed how mothers talked to their children at three years of age as they looked at a series of pictures together. They found that children whose mothers had often described the emotions of the people in the pictures did particularly well on social understanding tasks.

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