‘I’m Not Scared of Anything’

Abstract

This article examines how American middle-class children learn and acquire culturally appropriate emotions and sentiments, focusing especially on children’s experiences. By analysing children’s emotional worlds as well as adult socialization practices, the article shows that children actively reinterpret, reconstruct and reformulate various cultural resources offered through emotional socialization in order to organize their own culture-laden social worlds. The article articulates children’s agentive role in cultural reproduction and the inherent dynamism involved in socialization processes.