Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including family dysfunction as well as abuse and neglect, have enduring effects on development. Research across diverse populations documents that ACEs are prevalent and cumulative, influencing children’s developing mental, emotional, and physical systems that affect long-term physical and mental health, social relationships, and parenting attitudes and behaviors. Protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs), including nurturing relationships and stable, supportive environments, can mitigate the effects of ACEs, disrupting the intergenerational transmission of adversity. In this chapter, we summarize the effects of ACEs on neurobiological, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Next, we discuss the effects of cumulative protective experiences and the introduce the concept of Balanced Parenting to promote resilience in the face of adversity. We include examples of how parents and other caregivers can effectively parent children with a history of ACEs at different developmental stages, and conclude with a discussion of new directions for research and practice.

Working as co-editors and with our colleagues on this Handbook during the context of the global pandemic of 2019–2020 was certainly unanticipated and unlike any challenges we have ever known. As parents, we gained new appreciation for our research on how parenting shapes child development even as we struggled to use this knowledge within our own homes and lives. Future generations will have to uncover the role of the Covid-19 pandemic on parenting approaches and impacts on children around the globe. For now, we can honestly say we are both relieved and thrilled to share this work with our community of scholars to advance the goals of science and practice.

This chapter discusses parental emotion socialization (ES), or the ways in which parents teach children about the experience, expression, and regulation of emotions. The foundational theories of ES suggest that socialization can occur through a variety of mechanisms that vary with children’s age. Parents’ practices can broadly be either supportive or unsupportive. Methods for measuring and categorizing parents’ ES practices include questionnaires, naturalistic observation, and real-time discussion techniques. Research on ES involving these methods has revealed that supportive versus unsupportive practices are linked to differential effects on children’s emotion regulation skills, physiological self-regulation, psychological adjustment, and neural networks underlying emotion processing and regulation. In this chapter, we review the current findings on ES across infancy and early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence and young adulthood. These findings are contextualized by the discussion of research on the roles of fathers and culture in the ES process. Further, interventions focused on improving ES and emotion regulation in the parent-child relationship are highlighted. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future investigations of ES and relevant policy implications.