Emotion Regulation and Building Relationships: Socialization of Emotion in Early Childhood Classrooms

Many previous studies have looked at how parents serve as socializing agents for their children’s emotional development, with fewer studies focusing on other adults and peers in young children’s lives. The current study... [ view full abstract ]

Many previous studies have looked at how parents serve as socializing agents for their children’s emotional development, with fewer studies focusing on other adults and peers in young children’s lives. The current study examines teacher socialization of children’s negative emotion expressions in toddler and preschool classrooms in an early childhood education setting. Participants included 11 toddlers (M=2.67 years) and 18 preschoolers (M=3.96 years) who attended an early childhood education center in a rural New England town. We used naturalistic observations to record the types of negative emotions (sadness, anger, frustration) that children express (Cohen’s K=0.840) and the types of responses (comfort, intervention, problem-solving, non-response) that teachers use to respond to these negative emotions (Cohen’s K=0.874). We examined the relationship between these factors and children’s age (toddler and preschool classrooms), and found that significantly more negative emotion instances occurred in the toddler classroom than was expected (58%, or 91 out of 156, p<0.01). We also found that, regardless of age, problem-solving was teachers’ most common response, though when children expressed sadness, teachers responded most often with comfort. These results, combined with information from teacher interviews about their beliefs around teaching emotion regulation in the classroom, led us to understand that while younger toddlers have more instances of negative emotion expression, early childhood teachers use these instances as teaching opportunities. These practices may help explain why preschoolers having less instances of negative emotion expression, and can also utilize problem-solving when they do.