In most cultures, the family setting provides children with an initial set of experiences that will allow them to become productive adults, express their individual differences, form and maintain social contacts with others, and learn how to cope with daily hassles and major life stressors. Predominant beliefs or “parental ethnotheories” (Harkness & Super, 1996) about what is desired and appropriate child behavior guide parents' particular approaches to socialization. Therefore, regularities within settings, customs, and parents' belief systems organize children's developmental experiences and provide the information from which children construct the rules of their culture (Super & Harkness, 1986; Whiting, 1980). Depending on the cultural context, socialization involves activities in which children are steered away from certain behaviors and are strongly encouraged to engage in others. When upset with their peers, children may yell, hit someone, cry, seek help from others, or keep their feelings to themselves. Over time and with experience, children learn to cope with peer conflict using strategies that are normative within their peer group and adaptive to the goals and beliefs of their cultural community.

At present, we know very little about sociocultural settings in which children encounter stress and develop specific coping strategies. In this chapter, we draw on data from our ongoing studies of Chinese children's socioemotional functioning with their peers to begin to address this gap in the research literature.