Family emotional socialization, emotional understanding trajectories, and classroom positive expression: a three-wave longitudinal study of Chinese primary-school children.

Drawing on a three-wave panel design spanning two academic years, this study traced how family emotional socialization, children's emotional understanding, and classroom positive emotional expression unfold together over time. The sample comprised 426 Chinese parent-child dyads from urban public elementary schools. Within the focal within-person models, supportive reactions anchored the family-side predictor; non-supportive reactions, together with their punitive, minimization, and distress subtypes, fed the growth-curve and subscale analyses; and family emotional expressiveness was retained chiefly to ground the multidimensional measurement structure. Latent growth curve modeling described a clearly nonlinear trajectory for emotional understanding-accelerated gains in the earlier waves, followed by deceleration-a shape that aligns broadly with the normative consolidation of socio-emotional competence during early primary school. Against this normative backdrop, supportive parental practices predicted both higher initial levels and steeper growth of emotional understanding, whereas non-supportive reactions tracked the opposite pattern, indicating that family processes account for individual variation above and beyond age-graded change. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel analyses, which separate within-person dynamics from stable between-person differences, showed that supportive socialization prospectively predicted within-person increases in classroom positive expression at both measurement intervals, while the reverse paths did not reach significance. Multi-group RI-CLPM extensions stratified by respondent parent gender and by child gender produced broadly comparable within-person paths, with some attenuation in the smaller paternal subsample. When non-supportive reactions were disaggregated, punitive responses carried the strongest negative within-person link to subsequent emotional understanding, while minimization effects were comparatively muted. Emotional understanding operated as a significant longitudinal within-person mediator, accounting for roughly one-third of the within-person prospective effect. Together, these findings locate family emotional processes within a broader developmental ecology of children's socio-emotional competence in the Chinese cultural context.