Exploring the role of early childhood educators’ emotion socialization strategies in the development of young children’s social and non-social play behaviors

It is widely postulated that caregivers’ emotion socialization strategies support children’s positive socio-emotional functioning with peers. However, this theoretical model has been rarely examined empirically in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC), despite ECEC being a prominent environment for children to practice peer play (a robust marker variable for social and emotional competencies). This study explored the role of ECEC teachers’ emotion coaching and emotion distracting strategies in the development of children’s social and non-social play behaviors over time. Participants were 275 teachers and 487 children (aged 36–57 months) from 123 classrooms in 56 ECEC centers in Norway. Results from multilevel linear mixed modeling analyses indicated that emotion coaching was associated with a steeper increase in social play and steeper decrease in reticent behavior. In contrast, although emotion distracting was also associated with a steeper decrease in reticent behavior, it also predicted a less steep increase in social play. These results suggest that emotion coaching is a supportive socialization strategy for children’s peer relations in ECEC, whereas findings for distracting were more mixed. Using responses from multiple teachers within each classroom to examine both average classroom scores, in addition to minimum and maximum classroom scores, offers a novel insight into the group dynamics of teacher-child interactions in ECEC to support children’s peer relations.