An Ecological Approach to Emotion Socialization in the Early Childhood Classroom: Examining Contextual Influences on Children’s Early Social and Emotional Development

Abstract

Social and emotional competencies in early childhood are critical to young children’s educational success and holistic development (Greenberg et al., 2017). These skills are influenced by features of children’s contexts and relationships (Dunn, 2003; Jones et al., 2019) and are amenable to intervention early on (Murano et al., 2020). Yet, despite consensus on the importance of social and emotional skills in early childhood, much is still unknown about the developmental pathways by which early educational contexts affect the development of these skills. Research on emotion socialization in the classroom has illuminated specific teacher behaviors that contribute to children’s social and emotional development (Denham et al., 2012), but it is important to situate dyadic adult-child interactions within broader ecological contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). My dissertation research applies an ecological perspective to classroom-based emotion socialization to examine how relational features of early educational contexts are related to children’s social and emotional development. In Paper 1, I review existing literature on how relational processes relate to social and emotional development in the classroom and explicate a relational framework for capturing emotion socialization in preschool settings. In Paper 2, I use a large-scale dataset to investigate associations between relational socialization processes within the early educational setting and children’s social and emotional development. I find that teacher-child relationships and interactions are associated with children’s social and emotional skills, and classroom interaction supportiveness serves as a mechanism linking social and emotional instruction to children’s outcomes. In Paper 3, I document patterns of socialization processes in Head Start settings by using latent profile analysis to examine how features of preschool settings cluster together and relate to children’s developmental outcomes. I find evidence of five classroom profiles differentiated by dimensions of classroom relational climate and social and emotional instruction. Membership in particular classroom profiles is predicted by child emotion skills in the fall, and in some cases, predictive of children’s social skills in the spring. Taken together, these papers provide a framework to guide future study on emotion socialization in preschool settings and contribute empirical evidence on core features of classroom socializing contexts and their associations with children’s development.