Emotion Talk in Preschool Same-Sex Friendship Groups: Fluidity over Time and Context

Recent research suggests that through the medium of “emotion talk”, American, middle-class parents socialize daughters to express emotion more and to focus on sadness and socialize sons to express emotion less and to focus on anger. However, little is known about peer emotion socialization. The present study utilizes a notion of “emotion talk” expanded from previous studies and follows its use among preschool peers using a longitudinal design. Two friendships groups in a mixed-age preschool classroom of 3-and 4-year-old children at a university-based children's center were identified and videotaped in different contexts at different time points in the academic year. The boys' friendship group evolved norms over time against the expression of scaredness simultaneously with norms downgrading girl characteristics. Both the boys' and girls' friendship groups showed contextual fluidity in the expression of emotion and emotion talk that argue against an essentialist model of emotion socialization and development. This study's findings of contextual fluidity in emotion talk suggest policy implications for the promotion of gender equity. Mixed-age classrooms that provide children with a range of opportunities to engage in activities that cross gender boundaries may minimize gender polarization and maximize gender equity.     

Child Care Teachers' Response to Children's Emotional Expression

This observational study examined practices through which child care teachers socialize children's emotion. A specific aim was to describe strategies of teacher intervention in response to emotion displayed by children in child care centers, and to answer the question of differential interactions based on children's age and gender.

The results of this study were as follows: (a) toddler teachers matched and encouraged children's positive emotion expression more often than did preschool teachers; (b) in response to children's negative emotion, toddler teachers used physical comfort and distraction more often than did preschool teachers who relied more on verbal mediation; (c) in response to girls' negative emotional expressions, teachers provided more physical comfort and distraction whereas they were more likely to provide boys with constructive ways to express negative emotion.

The results of this study also revealed relatively infrequent teaching about constructive ways of expressing negative emotion and very few occurrences of teacher's empathy, two developmentally appropriate methods for socializing emotion. Teachers may benefit from a training program focusing on facilitating emotional competence.     

Gender-Specific Linkages of Affective Social Competence With Peer Relations in Preschool Children

Research Findings: We examined whether affective social competence, or the ability to effectively send and receive emotional signals and to manage one's own emotional experience, contributes to preschool children's peer relations. Forty-two previously unacquainted preschoolers were observed while participating in a week-long playschool. Greater nonstereotypical emotion knowledge was related to girls' popularity and boys' likelihood of having a reciprocal friendship. Girls with greater skill at sending emotional communications and managing emotions were more likely to have a reciprocal friendship. Boys who were better at managing emotions compared to others in their group were less popular. The role of social context in the influence of affective social competence on children's peer relations is discussed. Practice or Policy: Results have implications for early childhood educators' promotion of children's socioemotional skills.     

Boys Bonding: Same-sex friendship,the unconscious and heterosexual discourse

This article aims to explore some of the ways in which the cultural meanings and practices of gender, sexuality and relationships intersect with and are reworked in the same-sex friendships of children aged nine to eleven. Using material from an ethnographic study, it focuses on two boys, Ben and Karl, who identified themselves as best friends. The article argues that, while the boys clearly knew, positioned themselves in and deployed heterosexual discourse, their relationship to this was complex. In particular, they appeared to use it to distance themselves from the feminine and to build their friendship as a pleasurable, intimate and exciting space. The article uses psychoanalytic arguments to explore this material, tentatively suggesting that the boys' access to the cultural practice of 'best friendship' mobilised identifications that both reinforced conventional versions of heterosexual masculinity and questioned these. In particular, the article suggests that the boys' friendship may have involved 'over-inclusive' gender identifications - ones that indicate the existence of boyhood masculinities that are more capacious and flexible than those hegemonic in teenage and adolescent cultures.     

Parental perceptions of gender differences in child technology use and cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is a major health concern for today's youth and a pervasive stressor for adolescents and their families. This study offers qualitative insights into how parents perceive their children's technology use and engagement in cyberbullying based on gender. Eight focus groups were conducted with 48 parents of adolescents ages 10–17. Findings indicated parents perceived their children overuse technology and lack awareness of what cyberbullying is. Specific to gender, parents suggested their daughters use technology for social connection, and parents were more concerned about their daughter's technology use than their son's, which they believed was related to specific interests. In response to cyberbullying scenarios, parents encouraged females but not males to socialize with peers. This is the first qualitative study to obtain an in-depth understanding of the ways in which parents perceive and socialize their children in regard to technology use and cyberbullying scenarios. These results may help school systems, school psychologists, researchers, and parents gain awareness of the gender-stereotypical socialization process that unfolds in parental monitoring of technology use and cyberbullying situations. We conclude by offering suggestions for how school systems and personnel might intervene.     

Co-Producing Children's Sociality in Parent–Teacher Conferences

The aim of this article is to describe how parents and preschool teachers talk about children's interactional skills in parent–teacher conferences in the Swedish preschool and how this can be related to socialization processes. The analyses show that children's communicative skills, such as turn-taking in conversation and co-operation, are considered as important for both parents and teachers and talked about in terms of trouble or success. Children's skills are often assessed by using chronological age as a parameter. Our analysis suggests that the talk about children's interactional skills may be interpreted in terms of deficiency discourses founded primarily on theories in developmental psychology, and that parents, and particularly the teachers, present themselves as socializing agents with regard to children.     

Mothers' Acculturation and Beliefs About Emotions,Mother–Child Emotion Discourse,and Children's Emotion Understanding in Latino Families

Research Findings: We examined associations among Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, maternal beliefs, mother–child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in 40 Latino preschool-age children and their mothers. Mothers self-reported Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, and beliefs about the value/danger of children's emotions and parent/child roles in emotion socialization. Mother–child emotion talk was observed during a Lego storytelling task. Children's emotion understanding was measured using 2 age-appropriate tasks. Correlations showed that mothers' Latino enculturation was associated with mothers' stronger belief in guiding children's emotions and children's lower emotion understanding. Anglo acculturation was associated with mothers' lower belief that emotions can be dangerous and children's better emotion understanding. Mothers with a stronger belief in guiding children's emotions more frequently labeled emotions. Mothers with a stronger belief that emotions can be dangerous less frequently explained emotions. Regressions controlling for child age and maternal education demonstrated that mothers with a stronger belief that children can learn about emotions on their own and mothers with greater Latino enculturation had children with lower emotion understanding, whereas mothers with greater Anglo acculturation had children with better emotion understanding. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that understanding both family acculturation and family enculturation will be helpful for early childhood researchers and educators seeking to assess and promote children's socioemotional development.     

Dyadic analyses of friendship in a sample of preschool-age children attending Head Start: correspondence between measures and implications for social competence

Friendships among a large sample of preschool-age children (N = 471) attending Head Start were assessed. Based on sociometric data, friendship dyads were identified as reciprocated (mutual choice) or nonreciprocated (unilateral choice). Dyads were further classified with respect to gender composition as either same- or mixed-gender dyads. Older children were more likely to participate in a reciprocated friendship than were younger children and reciprocated dyads were more likely to be same-gender than were nonreciprocated dyads. Analyses of interaction between dyad partners revealed that reciprocated friends interacted more frequently across all categories of interaction coded and looked at each other more frequently than did members of nonreciprocated dyads. For the positive interaction subscore, the friendship status effect was modified by a significant interaction with gender composition such that significant effects of friendship status were obtained only for same-gender dyads. Additional analyses indicated that the average social competence level was greater for reciprocated dyads than for nonreciprocated dyads. The findings suggest that reciprocated friendships are meaningful for preschool-age children and may serve as special socialization contexts in which the repertoire of behavior can be exercised and perhaps improved. They also highlight the salience of same-gender friendships in the preschool classroom.     

Bricoleurs in preschool: girls poaching horror media and gendered discourses

Children's experiences and understandings are often marginalised in discussions of their own television viewing. Moreover, rarely is attention paid to the meaning children make from and with the ideas and images in media, much less in horror movies. This inquiry examines the horror media talk of a preschool girl in a poor and working-class preschool programme in a conservative Christian area in the Southern United States. One extended story by Jakaysha, a five-year-old African-American girl, is the focus of this paper. Using multiple post-structural theories including Davies' fluidity and Bakhtinian text mapping, we examine the contrasting gendered discourses in her narrative. Combining characters ‘poached’ from various media with discourses from her local community, she creates new horror media. In one reading of her tale, she uses horror to justify a departure from feminised subjectivities, while in another feminised expectations prevail, speaking to the multiple gendered subjectivities for girls.     

Cross-sex friendship in children: Gender patterns and cultural perspectives

An understanding of cross-sex friendship patterns can highlight male-female interactions in ways not revealed through investigations of same-sex friendships. Therefore, children's cross-sex friendship choices in two cultures were studied to explore culture- and gender-related biases in the socialization of sex roles. Fifth graders in America and Sweden responded to two sociometric questions about help with schoolwork and secret-sharing. Differences across gender and culture lines provided support for the existence of biases in gender-role training that may differ among cultures. Questions were raised regarding the role of social agents in the development of social cognitions, the amenability to change of traditional sex-typed behaviors, and the differences among cultures that might influence social-cognitive development. The fact that some children make cross-sex choices suggests that socialization practices do not influence all children uniformly. These differences bear further study.     

Relations Between Fantasy Orientation and Emotion Regulation in Preschool

Research Findings: Emotion regulation is a strong predictor of both short- and long-term peer relationships and social competence and is often targeted in preschool curricula and interventions. Pretense is a natural activity of childhood that is thought to facilitate the development of socialization, perspective taking, language, and possibly emotion regulation. This study investigated whether fantasy-oriented children, who engage in more pretense, demonstrate higher levels of emotion regulation. Prekindergartners (n = 103) and teachers were given a battery of measures assessing children’s emotion regulation, fantasy orientation, theory of mind, and language. Results from hierarchical regression analyses indicated that children’s proclivity toward fantastical play (their fantasy orientation) uniquely predicted 24% of the variance in their emotion regulation skills over and above typical predictors: age, theory of mind, and language skills. That is, children who participated in more fantasy pretense demonstrated better emotion regulation skills than their peers. Practice or Policy: The present study suggests that future research, curriculum, and interventions should focus on targeting fantastical pretense to assess causal mechanisms of emotion regulation development. Teachers and parents should encourage children’s fantastical pretense, as research suggests it may be an important contributor to the development of critical socialization skills such as emotion regulation.     

Peer Relationships Across the Preschool to School Transition

Research Findings: The aim of this longitudinal study was to explore peer relationships across the transition from preschool to school. Participants were 35 (17 male) children attending the Irish preschool initiative Early Start (M age = 49.31 months). Sociometric measures were employed on two occasions: at the end of preschool and in the first year of school. Results indicated that most preschoolers (83%) had at least one mutual friend, and by school age all children had at least one mutual friend. Almost one third (29%) of preschools and school-age children had a mutual best friend. Notably, all children made new friends in school. In addition, a number of friendships (18%) survived the preschool to school transition. Correlational analysis also suggested some stability in peer relationships from preschool into the first year of school. Exploratory multiple regression analyses showed that preschool peer variables predicted friendship status and social preference in school. Furthermore, best friendship in preschool uniquely predicted friendship in school, and best friend status in school was uniquely associated with social preference in school. Practice: Results have implications for parents' and early educators' promotion of children's friendships during the transition from preschool to school.     

Private Girls and Public Worlds: Producing femininities in the primary school

This article draws upon data gathered from a research project entitled 'Children's Relationship Cultures in Years 5 and 6'. The project aims to explore the ways in which primary school age children understand emotional, caring and family relationships. This paper will focus upon the role of friendship in the cultures of girls, aged 9-10, in a primary school classroom. An ethnographic approach is adopted to illustrate the variety of interactions in which friendship is spoken, displayed and enacted within pupil cultures. Analysis of these exchanges suggests that notions of friendship and patterns of friendship are constitutive of sexual-gender identities. The paper argues that being friends/breaking friends is a technique utilised for the regulation and negotiation of femininities and the production of differentiated sex-gender hierarchies. The paper will focus upon the activities of the 'diary group'--a self-styled network of eight girls who met in the school playground to discuss issues that interested and excited them. Recurrent themes in diary group discussions are identified as: puberty/periods; erotic attachments; and imagined futures. The paper suggests that the diary group can be seen as a site for identity production and asks the question: what kind of identities are being produced when these girls meet and talk? Finally, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which members of the diary group create a 'private' space within the public domain of the school and, through talk, produce themselves as feminine subjects.     

Emotional correspondence between preschoolers and teachers: what are the effects on child–teacher relationships?

ABSTRACT

The effects of the emotion regulation skills of the children attending preschool education on their interactions with their teachers are emphasised in recent studies. Therefore, in this study, we examined the effects of emotion regulation skills on the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the child. In total, 39 preschool teachers and 119 preschool children (55 girls and 64) boys from 5 public preschools participated in the study. Teachers were asked to fill Student-Teacher Relationship Scale-Short Form regarding three children in their classrooms and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for themselves. We conducted four observations by using MPAC-R/S in order to assess child’s abilities to express and regulate emotions. The results showed that children’s emotional states were effective on teacher’s relationship perception, and that teacher’s emotion regulation skills were also effective on his/her relationship perception. In addition, the cognitive reappraisal strategy used by the teacher in emotion regulation has also been found to have an impact on the negative emotional state of children.     

Boys as writers: perspectives on the learning and teaching of writing in three primary schools

Boys' attitude to writing is widely perceived as an issue in English primary and secondary schools. Prior research has identified a link between negative attitudes to writing and lower achievement and raised the issue of the stereotyping of boys as underachievers in literacy. The study reported here suggests that if we are to understand the problems associated with the underachievement of boys, we should take into account boys' perspectives on their experiences as literacy learners. In this study, boys aged 8–11 drawn from three London schools in the UK, were interviewed in small groups annually over 3 years of their primary schooling. The boys' teachers were also interviewed separately. These interviews generated insights into the teachers' views of the boys and the boys' views of themselves as literacy learners, especially as writers. The data indicated the boys were highly sensitive to the social situation in the classroom. The boys responded best to their literacy learning when their teachers treated them as individuals, valued their ideas and incorporated strategies for developing learner agency into their daily classroom practice. This article concludes that a teaching approach that includes consulting children about what helps or hinders their learning and a fresh teacher focus on gender issues would increase gender awareness.     

Aggressive behavior in preschoolers' social networks: Do birds of a feather flock together?

In a preschool setting, the naturally occurring aggressive behavior of sixtyfour 4-year-old children was observed and recorded. Individual differences in gender, behavioral style, social competence, reciprocal friendship, and social clique membership were examined to understand how these variables might be related to children's aggressive behavior. Variations in children's aggressive behavior were found to be associated with behavior style and social competence with peers. Children within social cliques were relatively similar in the frequency of their observed aggressive behavior. The results suggest that efforts to decrease children's aggression might target groups of children rather than individuals.     

Contextual Risk,Maternal Negative Emotionality,and the Negative Emotion Dysregulation of Preschool Children From Economically Disadvantaged Families

Research Findings: This study examined relations between contextual risk, maternal negative emotionality, and preschool teacher reports of the negative emotion dysregulation of children from economically disadvantaged families. Contextual risk was represented by cumulative indexes of family and neighborhood adversity. The results showed a direct pathway linking family adversity to child negative emotion dysregulation and indirect pathways for both family and neighborhood adversity through maternal negative emotionality. Practice or Policy: The results suggest the importance of conceptualizing distal and contextual aspects of the ecology of disadvantage as well as more proximal caregiving variables in interventions targeted for young children showing negative emotion dysregulation.     

Untangling the effects of shared book reading: Multiple factors and their associations with preschool literacy outcomes

Evidence strongly suggests that shared book reading at home and in preschool is important for young children's development of the foundational skills required for the eventual mastery of decoding and comprehension. Yet the nuances of how learning from book reading might vary across these contexts and with children's skills are not well understood. One hundred and thirty children participating in a longitudinal investigation of literacy development were videotaped reading a storybook with a parent. Children were also videotaped in their 33 preschool classrooms during the instructional book-reading portion of the day. Readings were coded for adult and child contextualized and decontextualized language relating to both decoding and meaning-making skills, and relations between this talk and emergent literacy outcomes were analyzed. Results demonstrate that parents and teachers overwhelmingly focus their book-related talk on meaning-related rather than code-related information, and that the relations between outcomes and talk depend in part on children's initial levels of vocabulary skills. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Gender differences in the strength of association between motivation,competency beliefs and reading skill

Background:?There is concern in the education community regarding gender differences in reading, as girls regularly outperform boys. There is also concern about the consequences of low motivation for children's engagement in reading and learning. An important question is whether boys' motivation is more closely linked to their attainment compared with girls.

Purpose:?The aim of the study was to examine how closely children's reading skill correlates with their intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and competency beliefs. There was a particular focus on gender.

Sample:?There were 492 children (240 boys) aged 7–11 in this study from four primary schools in England, UK.

Design and methods:?Children completed a reading comprehension assessment and a questionnaire examining intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and competency beliefs relating to reading and schoolwork. For analysis, children were split into a younger (age 7–8) and older (age 9–11) age group.

Results:?In both the younger and older groups, the boys' competency beliefs in reading and intrinsic motivation for reading and schoolwork were significantly more closely associated with their level of reading skill, in comparison with the girls.

Conclusions:?The closer reciprocal relationship between boys' intrinsic motivation, competency beliefs and reading skill could be interpreted in at least two ways. Firstly, boys' motivation and beliefs in their ability may be more dependent on their success in reading. Alternatively, boys' motivation and competency beliefs may play a more significant role in the effort they put into reading.