Peer cultures and climate emotions in early childhood : a culture-evolutionary framework

Abstract

Climate change increasingly shapes children’s emotional landscapes, yet research continues to conceptualise young children’s emotional responses primarily as individual psychological reactions rather than as socially produced and culturally transmitted phenomena. This article proposes a new cultural–evolutionary framework, the Peer Emotional Evolution Model (PEEM), to address this theoretical gap. Drawing together scholarship on cultural evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, and childhood sociology, the PEEM conceptualises children’s peer groups as emotional microecologies in which emotional variants, such as fear, curiosity, excitement, or hope, arise, spread, stabilise, or fade through processes of variation, selection, transmission, and retention. This framework illustrates how play, storytelling, moral judgements, humour, and shared narratives become mechanisms through which climate emotions circulate and acquire social durability. The article articulates specific propositions for empirical testing, identifies boundary conditions and limitations, and outlines a concrete research agenda for examining PEEM in diverse early childhood contexts. The article is conceptual in nature and offers a theoretically generative framework for future research and practice in early childhood environmental education. It concludes by identifying implications for theory, early childhood education, and climate emotion scholarship, emphasising the need to recognise young children as active participants in the cultural evolution of climate emotions rather than passive recipients of adult discourse.