Teachers Promote Children’s Emotion Regulation – How and how Well do They do it?

• In Event: Emotion Regulation Between 2 and 6 Years – Behavioral Dynamics and Developmental Correlates

Abstract

Children’s emotional experiences during early childhood education and care (ECEC) are of significance for the emotional development of children and its socialization through teachers (Denham, 2012). One central goal of emotion socialization is acquiring a reflective regulation of emotions resulting in socially acceptable and age-appropriate experience and behavior (Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004; Holodynski et al., 2012). The current study is based on emotionally challenging situations of children in ECEC and aims at investigating, first, how individual child, teacher and situational characteristics are associated with the type of support that teachers provide. Second, teachers’ emotion coaching and specific co-regulation will be explored in terms of their supportiveness for children’s emotion regulation, that is, (a) how they are associated with children’s self-regulation of emotions within those challenging situations and (b) which type of support and which individual teacher and child characteristics best predict global quality ratings. Based on extensive video observations in the preschool setting (N = 19 groups), episodes with teacher interventions (N = 48 teachers; 2-5 teachers per group) following a negative emotion expression through one or two children (N = 213 children aged 2-6 years old) were analyzed. Multilevel results show, first, that teachers apply emotion coaching and the type of co-regulation in dependence from child, teacher and situational characteristics. Key findings are that children were more likely to receive emotion coaching – defined as validating the child’s expression and affect mirroring, labeling emotions and discussing emotions – when they showed sadness versus anger expressions and when they were the only emotionally involved child in the episode. Teachers’ use of specific strategies was associated with the child’s emotion quality: While soothing, distraction and reappraisal strategies occurred more often in sadness versus anger episodes, the opposite was true for behavioral modification strategies. Second, teachers’ initial emotion coaching, as well as their use of meta-cognitive prompts, were associated with children’s independent self-regulation of emotion within episodes. Concerning quality ratings, one important predictor of teachers’ appropriate and successful co-regulation and completion of the episode was teachers’ higher work experience and their use of initial emotion coaching. Using the example of emotion coaching, Figure 1 illustrates how teachers use emotion coaching dependent from situational characteristics and how it is associated with children’s self-regulation and with quality ratings of episodes. Finally, the findings support teachers’ significant role in children’s development of emotion regulation and highlight the importance to account for contextual characteristics concerning the individual child and teacher, as well as the specific situation. The findings will be discussed in terms of their relevance to ECEC teachers’ optimal use of emotion coaching and co-regulation to promote children’s emotion regulation.

Authors

• Judith Silkenbeumer, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
  Presenting Author

• Luisa Marie Lüken, University of Münster

• Manfred Holodynski, University of Münster

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münser