Early-childhood Teachers’ Emotion Socialization Practices: A Multi-Method Study at Nursery

Early childhood teachers respond and react to toddlers’ emotions in different ways. Independently of teachers’ leading style (i.e., coaching or dismissing), multiple factors may elicit a range of responses, and variability may even occur within a single interaction. Hence, we aimed to capture the variability, contingency, and complexity of teachers’ responses to children’s emotional distress via a multi-method research design, that combined self-report measures and structured observational situations at nursery. Eighty-nine teachers (Mage = 38.29 years; SD = 11.06) completed two questionnaires about their emotion socialization style and beliefs about emotions, respectively. A subsample of 40 teachers also participated in two experimental situations designed for observing their responses to children’s emotional distress. We developed an innovative coding system for classifying teachers’ reactions in terms of focus (problem, emotion, solution, time) and style (coaching, dismissing, and amplifying, a new style we detected). All teachers deployed a variety of emotion socialization practices, even within the same situation. Coaching reactions (especially emotion-focused) were the most frequent overall, followed by dismissing (problem- and emotion-focused responses) and, to a lesser extent, amplifying responses (mainly problem-focused). There were significant associations between the self-report scores and the responses observed in the experimental situations. Helping teachers to recognize the reasons and impacts of their behaviors and fostering their own emotional competence represent first key steps towards making them feel more effective and changing their representations surrounding emotions. This in turn should make them increasingly more skilled at offering supportive and attuned responses to children’s emotions.