Emotions as Fixatives for Children’s Understandings About the World

Parents’ emotions provide unintentional and intentional communications to their children, attaching themselves to the messages that children receive about the ways of the world. Both theory and research suggest that parents’ emotions impact children’s learning and activate children’s affective orientations to objects, concepts, and people. Applying these concepts to real-life problems, this chapter explores the role of emotions as a “fixative” in the process of socializing children’s understanding of the world and particularly the development of beliefs about race. We suggest that the emotions associated with messages about race are not overtly recognized as part of the messages and that these emotional layers are the invisible glue that hold these messages and subsequent beliefs in position. Although the chapter focuses primarily on negative emotions, it also notes the role of positive emotions, such as pride, with the hope of generating more research on these emotions in relation to racial understanding.