This chapter focusses on how insights from Vygotsky’s work on child and adolescent development can be employed to create a relational pedagogy that nurtures the agency of students as learners, enabling them to be creative makers of their and their communities’ futures. These insights are augmented by more recent contributions to his legacy. Consequently, the role of motive orientation, imagination and agency in taking forward learners’ trajectories is discussed in relation to playworlds in early education settings, makerspaces in schools, the careful use of moral imagining in creating new futures for disengaged adolescents and responsive relational teaching in mainstream schooling. The four approaches all employ pedagogies which aim at the unfolding of student agency and which can be explained by the concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. The need for school systems to create environments where teachers can support student agency is recognised.

Today’s parents are subject to strict rules about how to raise their children. Some rules focus on parents’ emotions: Parents are bound by emotional display rules, according to which “ideal parents” should be “emotionally perfect” – showing positive emotions and refraining from negative ones while interacting with their children. This chapter introduces Lin and colleagues’ pioneering efforts in borrowing the emotional labor framework to shed light on the consequences for parents of their subjection to these emotional display rules. The emotional labor framework, initially proposed by sociologists, holds that employees must consciously align their feelings with emotional display rules when interacting with customers. This framework provides insight into the mechanisms underlying the relation between emotional labor performed by employees and their well-being. This chapter presents the application of the emotional labor framework to the parenting context and outlines future research directions that this approach opens. We believe that extending the emotional labor framework to the context of parenting opens a promising research avenue in the parenting field.

In this chapter, we focus on an understudied aspect of children’s and youth’s civic engagement, namely their responsible agency. ‘Responsible agency’ draws attention to children and youth’s ethical and political aspirations and how they give meaning to their civic engagement. Over the last decades, the ways in which children and youth engage in civic activities have been in motion. An important form of this engagement are personally resonant activities that we call civic projects. Our cultural-historical activity theory analysis of two ongoing civic projects - P365 and Climate Warriors – highlights how the projects emerge and are sustained and developed through the children and youth’s responsible agency as well as the re-mediation of social and material support for the projects.

A contribution to discussions of agency and change from the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory consists of findings on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). Aspects of these discussions revolve around the hidden, unrecognized and often suppressed power of hybrid coalitions coming together contribute to making a more just and sustainable world. This chapter presents a theoretical argument supported by empirical examples showing that TADS is intrinsically a power-sensitive conceptualization of agency. The chapter engages in dialogue with and expands on the proposition of power in the sociology of real utopias, arguing that, despite the strong dialectical and progressive stance it adopts, this perspective is still predominantly based on accounts and critiques of how power is played out. A chronological account of two subsequent studies on eradicating homelessness helps construct an expanded proposition in which TADS can serve a key generating and mediating function of power.

It is becoming increasingly clear that emotion regulation (ER) plays a crucial role in parenting. In this chapter, we consider the role of parental ER in parental stress and parental burnout. In the first section, we define ER and its various facets in the parenting domain. In the second section, we focus on the protective role of parent’s self-focused (intrinsic) ER vis-à-vis parenting stress and burnout. Specifically, we show how parents’ efficient regulation of their own emotions mitigates parenting stress levels and reduces the risk for parental burnout. In the third section, we focus on the protective role of parent’s child-focused (extrinsic) ER vis-à-vis parenting stress and burnout. Specifically, we show how parents’ efficient regulation of their child(ren)’s emotions reduces their own parenting stress. Because perfect is often the enemy of good in the parenting domain, the fourth section presents recent evidence showing that too much ER may backfire and lead to increased parenting stress and burnout in the long run. Finally, we conclude with the most pressing research directions emerging from the evidence reviewed in this chapter.

Emotional development can be described as the emergence of a child’s self-regulation out of coregulation by their caregivers, especially parents. This chapter highlights this transition, focusing on two interwoven facets of emotional development: the regulation of actions by emotions and the regulation of emotions by volitionally applied actions, called reflective emotion regulation. The significance of parental coregulation strategies is considered, specifically how they contribute to the differentiation of emotion qualities throughout ontogenesis as well as to a conceptual awareness of a child’s own elicited feelings and the inferred feelings of others, which is required for reflective emotion regulation. The chapter addresses core parental strategies such as context selection and modification, affect mirroring, modeling, reflective functioning and talking about emotions as well as levels of coregulation, and also presents a brief overview of the field. The chapter closes with a look at noteworthy issues for further research.

In cultural-historical activity theory, the move from orientation to action is connected to the experiencing of contradictions as personally significant conflicts of motives. Our study builds on the theory of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). We conducted a Change Laboratory intervention with adolescents to support them to work on their motive conflicts and to construct and implement projects they found significant. With the help of Sannino’s model, we analyse the evolution of students’ projects as efforts to move from mental future orientation to practical and material future-making. In our data, the conflict of motives and the creation of second stimuli emerged as the most critical steps in the TADS process. We argue that it is time to make the shift from studying young people’s future orientations as private mental phenomena to fostering and analysing future-making as material public actions that generate use-value and have an impact beyond the individual.

Over the last 30 years, child and family scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized the foundational role of parental emotions in guiding parenting behaviors. This chapter delineates the ways in which parents’ emotional processes (including emotion regulation) are inextricably intertwined with even the quickest and most automatic parenting behaviors. We review the extant literature on parental emotion regulation, including studies of parents’ general emotion dysregulation, use of emotion regulation strategies, and emotion-related physiological processes during parent–child interaction. Throughout this review, we make note of leaps forward as well as remaining gaps in the science. Finally, we propose three major areas for the next phase of research linking parent emotion regulation and parenting behavior: (1) reframing our thinking away from general negative affect or dysregulation models and toward a consideration of specific emotions; (2) increasing attention to regulation of positively valenced emotions like joy, contentment, pride, and awe; and (3) embracing multimethod approaches that incorporate ecologically valid methodology.

In the USA, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler-colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the following year, the team worked on the implementation of the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate the process. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity and utilized funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

Emotions and emotion regulation constitute essential constituents of parenting. This chapter assesses central features of parenting through the lens of emotions and emotion regulation. Substantive topics include relations between emotions and emotion regulation in parenting, principles of parenting and emotion regulation, parenting direct and indirect effects in emotion regulation, determinants of emotion regulation in parents (and children), and supports for parent and child emotion regulation.

Across development, parents play a critical role in assisting children in regulating emotions via extrinsic emotion regulation (ER). Cross-species evidence suggests that parental influences on corticolimbic circuitry – thought to underlie ER – peak in childhood and wane during the transition to adolescence as children increasingly rely on intrinsic regulation strategies. Gottman’s parental meta-emotion philosophy laid important groundwork for recent advances in assessment of parental assistance with children’s use of specific ER strategies, a line of work that has the potential to further understanding of how parents socialize children’s reliance on certain ER strategies. Initial evidence suggests that the strategies parents assist with may vary as a function of child age and parent-level factors such as psychopathology and reliance on specific intrinsic ER strategies. We discuss future directions in the study of parental assistance with children’s ER focused on further understanding normative developmental trajectories of parents’ assistance with specific ER strategies and neurobiological correlates of specific profiles of parental assistance.

In this chapter we articulate how transformative agency via double stimulation in cultural-historical activity theory can be a form of emancipatory agency from below among those most historically excluded and marginalised. Generated in a six-year-long formative intervention focussing on African land restitution, we show that the emergence of emancipatory transformative agency involves responsive mediation in which second stimuli, suitable to arising contradictions and conflict of motives, need to be co-developed as the formative intervention process unfolds. Emancipatory transformative agency by double stimulation (ETADS) pathways involve complex and parallel forms of movement over time that are not necessarily linear. The chapter reveals that ETADS pathways emerge as communities take ethical-political ownership of co-directing the emancipatory direction of their own development in the formative intervention process. In the process they challenge deep-seated oppressions of longue durée, transform power relations, build intergenerational solidarity and make decisions that advance the common good.

This chapter explores two experiences in which transformative agency and the elaboration of innovative mediating artifacts contributed to change in childbirth care in Brazil. In the first case, we analyze how an organized group of women built cultural tools to expose the excess of cesarean sections in the private health sector, leading to change in regulatory policy. In the second case, we analyze the elaboration of an institutional birth plan model in a formative intervention inspired by the Change Laboratory methodology. Both experiences can be understood as efforts to promote social participation and informed choice, using mediating artifacts to foster agency. The processes ignited by them are also analyzed by the perspective of pedagogy of autonomy as proposed by Freire, in the sense that women are able to build knowledge and act on that knowledge in a meaningful and effective way.

This chapter examines interventions that focus on parent emotion regulation (ER). Emotions, their function, the different pathways via which emotions are generated, and the role of ER are all briefly introduced to provide the context for the way interventions efforts are considered in the chapter. Interventions that focus on ER in adults drawn from different theoretical perspectives are examined in order to review key common effective components. This is followed by a review of approaches to parent ER used in parenting interventions. We then outline how our own Tuning in to Kids suite of parenting programs targets parent ER. This includes a focus on building parent emotion awareness; promoting insight into parent’s meta-emotion beliefs (how they feel about emotions) and the impact of family of origin experiences on how parents react to emotions; teaching parents proactive, top-down, and bottom-up ER strategies; and how a focus on learning emotion coaching with their children has the added bonus of often enhancing parent ER.