Family storytelling is an essential cultural tool for processing impactful social and emotional events. While storytelling has been studied extensively in other fields such as anthropology (e.g., storytelling as a cultural practice) and within psychology (e.g., narrative psychology), there is an existing gap in developmental affective science in understanding how family storytelling may shape children’s emotion regulation. Much work in narrative psychology suggests that telling stories within one’s family contributes to children’s identity development and can bolster feelings of connectedness and belongingness with prior generations. Furthermore, children in families that discuss negative life experiences together typically have better self-regulatory competence than children in families that do not. In this project, I posit that the family story is a rich, contextual method to study factors related to emotional development and emotional socialization that shapes how children interpret and manage life experiences. I examined three facets of parental family storytelling– narrative coherence, narrative strategy (redemption vs. contamination), and mention of specific emotion regulation strategies- as they relate to children’s use of emotion regulation strategies. Correlational analyses revealed that parents’ family story narrative coherence was related to children’s use of cognitive reappraisal, even when accounting for parents’ cultural values and children’s age. Additionally, I used qualitative content analysis to analyze the different sociocultural factors parents mentioned in their stories, and the reasons parents believed telling the family story was important. Results indicated that family stories contain rich detail about many relevant and impactful relational, environmental, and historical factors that may shape emotion socialization practices and children’s emotional development. There were seven reasons for storytelling that emerged from parents’ responses: supporting identity development, connecting generations, sharing and discussing feelings, teaching lessons, remembering history, passing on culture, and gaining an understanding of others. This project suggests that telling stories about family history could be a new direction for developmental affective science to measure individuals’ emotional ecology and emotion processes across generations.