LAUSR

The importance of social-emotional development has been increasingly recognized by educators, parents, and policymakers. Social-emotional competencies allow children to manage emotions and regulate behaviors, learn skills and acquire knowledge, achieve well-being and practice resilience (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), 2012). In fact, socialemotional competencies contribute to important developmental milestones in early childhood (Trawick-Smith & Smith, 2014). Social-emotional competencies also predict a wide range of adjustment measures, including prosocial behaviors, self-regulation, school readiness, and academic success (Denham et al., 2002; Ren et al., 2016). Drawing on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes, social-emotional competencies mature but need to be taught and learned throughout childhood. These competencies are reflected in children’s abilities to express their feelings, engage with others, and attend to their increasingly complex, intrapersonal, and interpersonal world. Social-emotional development can be studied using multiple perspectives, as an antecedent, a process, and an outcome. As suggested by the theory of developmental niches, for example, parents and teachers play an irreplaceable role in the development and socialization of children (Harkness & Super, 2006). As children are growing up, they also actively shape their own environments and embark on intricate processes of self-socialization (Lam et al., 2012; Scarr, 1992). Research on social-emotional development continues to focus on the experiences from North America and Europe, however. Relatively a few studies have examined social-emotional development in Asian-Pacific regions, although different cultures may emphasize different aspects of socialemotional development (Eisenberg et al., 2001; Hecht & Shin, 2015), affording different opportunities for and imposing different constraints on it (Chen, 2009). The role of culture in children’s social-emotional development has gained increasing attention from both qualitative and quantitative researchers (Kwong et al., 2018; Li et al., 2020). Given the importance of social-emotional competencies as developmental, pedagogical, and intervention approaches and its benefits on children’s long-term adjustment, it is essential to identify school and home processes that enhance and hinder children’s social-emotional development in different cultural contexts.