The emotional understanding skills of children develop within parent-child relationships and healthy emotional development has been widely recognized as essential to children’s social and psychological adjustment. However, to date the emotional development of children in less supportive households has received little research attention. The current study compared the influence of maternal socialization on the emotional understanding skills of children in neglectful and nonneglectful mother-child dyads, with a particular interest in three aspects of maternal socialization: maternal support in response to children’s emotional displays, maternal discussion reflective of emotional understanding, and maternal expression of negative emotion. Participants were 24 neglected children and their mothers recruited from 2 parenting programs and a control sample of 24 nonneglected children and their mothers recruited from community agencies. Interviews included measures of expectations of maternal support, discussion of emotion, frequency of emotional experience, and emotional understanding. Results of statistical analyses indicated that neglectful mothers, in contrast to nonneglectful mothers, provided less support to children’s emotional displays, engaged in less emotional discussion, and expressed more negative emotion. Neglected children demonstrated lower levels of emotional understanding in comparison to their nonneglected peers. Future research should focus on the possible relationship between the emotional understanding skills of neglected children and their social and psychological adjustment. Tables, appendix, references