This article describes how parents foster emotional development in their children through the words they speak during daily conversations. The author presents a case study of a father and his infant daughter and the developmental progression of talk. In the first 6 months of life, talk revolved around the infant's feelings, and later in the first year talk turned more to objects. The second year of life, after the child learned a few words, revealed a dramatic change in emotion socialization with conversation that both built the child's vocabulary related to emotions and facilitated her cognitive understanding of emotions.