Integrating emotional, socio-cultural and developmental perspectives, the current research focuses on examining the emergence of self-regulatory abilities and emotion understanding in children. In particular, the studies explore how mother-child interactions serve as a mechanism underlying the development of these complex social-cognitive abilities. The first study examines in a cross-cultural context the role that maternal verbal interactions play in affecting children's developing emotion knowledge. Furthermore, two of the current studies examine how these abilities relate to later psycho-social adjustment, of these two one specifically examines how culture moderates these effects. I take a bio-ecological systems theory approach, which argues that multiple environmental and individual subsystems play important roles in influencing children's development. Furthermore, the specific mechanisms and consequences of these interactions on children's socio-emotional understanding and mental health outcomes through the lens of the cultural-fit hypothesis, which emphasizes the person-situation interaction and highlights how psychological processes may vary across cultures and contexts. In sum, the current set of studies is designed to explore how culture and context affect parenting and children's socialemotional abilities, and how these abilities affect children's mental health.