“Sprinkle Pretend Glitter on Your Head and Swirl It Around”: Exploring Black Girls’ Emotional Meaning-Making Through Caregiver-Guided Shared Book Reading

Reflecting on emotionally challenging experiences with caregivers is a critical developmental process through which children learn to identify, express, and regulate emotions. However, much of the existing literature on caregiver–child emotion socialization has centered White, middle-class families, limiting understanding of how these processes unfold within culturally and contextually situated interactions among Black families. Guided by Margaret Beale Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory and the Integrative Conceptual Model of Adaptive Racial/Ethnic and Emotion Socialization, the present study explored how Black girls (ages 5–11) described experiences of sadness, stress, and anger during caregiver-guided conversations embedded within a culturally grounded shared book reading activity. Fifteen Black girls (M = 8.27 years, SD = 1.71) and their caregivers participated in a novel video-recorded shared reading activity followed by a guided discussion about emotions. Black girls described sadness in relation to separation from loved ones, social exclusion, and witnessing harm; stress primarily in response to academic pressures; and anger in response to perceived unfairness and injustice. They also identified diverse emotion regulation strategies, including deep breathing, solitude, cognitive reframing, imaginative coping, and seeking social support. Across emotional contexts, caregivers consistently encouraged elaboration, validated children’s emotional experiences, and reinforced adaptive coping strategies, creating supportive opportunities for collaborative emotional meaning-making. Our findings highlight shared reading as a culturally affirming context for caregiver-supported emotion socialization and underscore the importance of centering Black girls’ voices in research on socioemotional development.