Early childhood social development: Social and Emotional Development in Early Learning Settings

Social and Emotional Development in Early Learning Settings

How Is Social and Emotional Development Supported in Early Learning Settings?

Early learning settings are rich with opportunities to build and practice social and emotional skills; however, the quality of these settings affects the degree to which a child’s social and emotional development is supported. In high-quality settings, children benefit from “frequent, warm and stimulating” interactions with caregivers who are attentive and able to individualize instruction based on children’s needs and strengths. Early educators in high-quality settings are trained in early childhood education and tend to be less controlling and restrictive in their approach to classroom management.

Licensure and accreditation, well-trained caregivers, low staff-child ratios and parent involvement are generally considered to be fundamental to high-quality care and education. Such elements not only promote strong, secure relationships and positive interactions between caregiver and child, but also improve attention to children’s interest, problem-solving, language development, social skills and physical development.

High-quality early learning opportunities can also reduce the risk of children experiencing poor mental health. Research shows it can mitigate the effects of poverty, maternal depression and other risk factors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, high-quality child care helps build resilience among at-risk children, partly due to the relationships they form with caregivers. When children perceive at least one supportive adult in their life, they are less likely to experience toxic stress and suffer the detrimental effects of adverse experiences.

Well-trained early care and education professionals are critical to supporting social and emotional competence in young children. First and foremost, they build nurturing and responsive relationships with the children in their care and model respectful and appropriate behavior. They weave social and emotional skill-building into day-to-day activities and implement targeted curriculum and lessons with books, music, games and group discussions.

Effective early care and education professionals consider and support the individual needs of each child within the context of their family and culture. Head Start, the federally funded, locally implemented birth-to-5 program for low-income children, emphasizes that “children’s learning is enhanced when their culture is respected and reflected in all aspects” of an early learning program. Early childhood programs implementing culturally reflective policies and practices may look different depending on the setting, but at their core, they are learner-focused, promote a positive cultural and individual identity, and engage all children from unique cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds. Cultural awareness is key for early care and education professionals in forming strong relationships with children and families.

Early care and education professionals are also critical to identifying children who face barriers to healthy social and emotional development and helping families obtain the support they need. They sometimes partner with an early childhood mental health consultant to address challenging behaviors and develop behavior support plans.

An increasing number of early learning settings are implementing Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) frameworks. The frameworks are designed to equip early care and education professionals with the skills and tools they need to support positive social and emotional development and address challenging behavior. A program-wide PBIS does not prescribe a specific curriculum. Instead, it includes a series of practices, interventions and implementation supports that are available across the system. One such framework, the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children (Pyramid Model), is specifically designed for programs serving infants and toddlers. Twenty-five states have established statewide coalitions and leadership teams to implement the Pyramid Model (often housed within a state’s human services or education department). The Pyramid Model organizes evidence-based practices into three progressively intensive tiers: universal supports for the wellness of all children, targeted services for those who need more support, and intensive services for those most in need. The model emphasizes how essential early care and education professionals are to the social and emotional well-being of young children by positioning “effective workforce” as the foundation.

Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation

Infant and early childhood mental health consultation (IECMHC) is an evidence-based strategy to support healthy social and emotional development and “prevent, identify, and reduce the impact of mental health problems among young children and their families,” according to the Center for Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation. IECMH consultants help build the capacity of the adults in young children’s lives to support healthy social and emotional development at home and in early learning settings. IECMH consultants have master’s degrees and are licensed mental health professionals who provide indirect, prevention-based services. They partner with families to assess concerns, assist with implementing positive behavioral supports, and connect families to other services and supports. Within early learning settings, IECMH consultants provide classroom-focused interventions that target all children, home-based interventions for more high-risk children, and referrals for those children who need more specialized services. Additionally, IECMH consultants support early care and education professionals by providing reflective supervision, coaching, training and case consultation.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Center of Excellence for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation emphasizes the field’s role in promoting equity and reducing disparities in access to resources and outcomes for young children. Equity, according to SAMHSA’s IECMHC Toolbox, is “the quality of being fair, unbiased, and just. ” Equity is essential to reducing disproportionalities among young children of color in suspensions and expulsions in early learning settings. IECMH consultants partner with early care and education professionals to “reflect on their own experiences, biases, and fears—and then move beyond them to see each young child as an individual within a unique family and community context.” There is growing evidence that access to IECMHC reduces the occurrence of suspensions and expulsions for young children.

How Prepared Are Early Care and Education Professionals to Care for Children With Challenging Behaviors?

Despite the importance of their role, many early care and education professionals report not feeling adequately trained to respond to challenging behaviors or to support children at risk of mental health issues. A national survey of the early care and education workforce revealed just 20% of respondents received training on supporting social and emotional growth in the past year. When asked what types of support would help them better address the needs of children with challenging behavior, professionals in Maine most frequently selected additional training (61%) and greater access to early childhood behavioral specialists (57%). In a similar survey in Virginia, respondents identified access to specialists (63%), additional supports for families (54%) and increased training for staff (52%) as necessary to improving outcomes for children.

Survey participants in both Maine and Virginia were also asked about the effects of challenging behaviors in the classroom. Concerns included the ability to attend to other children and ensuring the safety and ability of other children to learn. Respondents also noted the negative effect challenging behaviors have on their own well-being.

Without adequate training and supports to handle these stressful situations, early care and education professionals—among whom depression is not uncommon—burn out and leave the profession. Extremely low wages further contribute to their stress. At an average annual salary of just over $22,000, nearly half of the early care and education workforce is enrolled in at least one public support program. These include the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Researchers have found that stress negatively affects early care and education professionals’ ability to provide positive, high-quality environments and is the primary reason they leave the field. Bringing the problem full circle, high turnover among early care and education professionals disrupts the relationships and attachments formed with the children they care for and is linked to poorer developmental outcomes for early learners.

Furthermore, early care and education professionals who lack training may be unprepared to distinguish concerning behaviors from those that are developmentally appropriate. Misinterpreting or mischaracterizing behaviors may lead to more punitive discipline and failure to provide appropriate supports. Underprepared professionals are more likely to over-identify children, especially children of color, for special education, disciplinary action and expulsions. Suspensions and expulsions are more likely to occur in early learning settings that have high student-adult ratios, private ownership, extended hours, limited access to early childhood behavioral specialists, and teachers who report high levels of stress.

Implicit Bias in Early Learning Settings

In a study by researchers at Yale University, early care and education professionals were instructed to look for challenging behaviors in a video of an early learning classroom where none was present. Researchers used technology to track eye movements and found that when challenging behaviors were expected, teachers tended to observe the black children more closely, especially the black boys.

Another component of the study found that when teachers were provided additional information on a child’s family and background, and when the teacher’s race matched that of the child, teachers tended to lower the severity rating of the child’s behavior. Researchers concluded by calling for greater connections between early care and education professionals and parents, as well as increased training to address biases and increase empathy.

Suspension and expulsion in early learning settings

Data collected in recent years by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has shined a spotlight on how common suspensions and expulsions are in early learning settings. In fact, expulsion rates among preschoolers are three times higher than those of K-12 students. Stark disparities in suspension and expulsion rates among young children based on race and gender led researchers to question the effect of implicit bias, or the “automatic and unconscious stereotypes that drive people to behave and make decisions in certain ways. Black children, who comprise just 19% of preschool enrollment, make up 47% of preschoolers who are suspended. Research shows students of color are more harshly disciplined for the same behaviors exhibited by their white peers. Furthermore, 75% of expelled preschoolers are boys, with black boys being suspended or expelled the most often. The consequences for young children who are suspended or expelled can be significant and long-lasting. The same children are more likely to be suspended or expelled again in later years and to drop out of high school, fail a grade or be incarcerated.

In 2016, U.S. departments of Health and Human Services and Education issued a policy statement and recommendations aimed at preventing and severely limiting suspensions and expulsions of young children. The departments recommended that early learning programs take the following steps:

• Improve the workforce’s skill set and capacity to support social and emotional development, address challenging behaviors appropriately, and form supportive and nurturing relationships with children and their families.
• Provide training to deepen the workforce’s understanding of cultures and diversity, practice self-reflective strategies and correct biases.
• Increase access to behavioral specialists (including IEMCH consultants).
• Promote the health and well-being of the workforce with reasonable work hours, breaks and access to supports, such as social or mental health services.

The policy statement also made recommendations directly to states, including enacting state policies severely limiting the use of suspensions and expulsions across all early learning settings, collecting data on the use of exclusionary discipline and setting goals for its reduction. It also recommended investing in workforce training and implementing policies to increase quality in early learning settings.

Social and Emotional Development | ECLKC

Positive social and emotional development in the early years provides a critical foundation for lifelong development and learning. Social development refers to a child’s ability to create and sustain meaningful relationships with adults and other children. Emotional development is a child’s ability to express, recognize, and manage his or her emotions, as well as respond appropriately to others’ emotions. Both social and emotional development are important for young children’s mental health. In fact, early childhood mental health is the same as social and emotional development!

To read more about this domain, visit the Interactive Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework. The Social and Emotional Development domains for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers include the following sub-domains:

• Relationships with Adults
• Relationships with Other Children
• Emotional Functioning
• Sense of Identity and Belonging

Effective Teaching Practices

The effective teaching practices that follow are grouped in three categories: Interactions, Environment, and Individualization. Examples of ways to support goals for children are provided by sub-domain. It is likely, however, that these practices will also support goals for children in additional domains and sub-domains. This is the nature of teaching and learning in the early years.

Home Visitors

Teaching practices in home visiting are the ways that home visitors work with families to provide experiences that support their child’s development and learning, engage in responsive interactions, and use the home as the learning environment. Home visitors:

• Facilitate parent-child interactions
• Engage parents in focusing on their child’s development
• Directly encourage parents to teach, talk, and interact with their child in responsive and warm ways
• Use family activities, routines, and materials in the home for learning
• Collaborate with parents to plan activities and experiences

Home visitors may consider using group care teaching practices in the “Know,” “Do,” and “Improve” sections during home visits and group socializations. They can engage with parents to identify, adapt, and use these practices or when appropriate, model the practices.

Sub-Domains

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Relationships with Adults

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Relationships with Other Children

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Emotional Functioning

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Sense of Identity and Belonging

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Social and Emotional Development

,  School Readiness

Resource Type:
Article

National Centers:
Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning

Last Updated: March 2, 2021

The social situation of development in early childhood (1-3 years) and the leading activity

The age period from 1 to 3 years is called early childhood. This stage is characterized by personal changes, changes in the sphere of cognition, in the social situation of development. Relations between a child and an adult are changing, this leads to the formation of a new social situation of development.

The social situation of development

It is characterized by the appearance of a joint objective activity of a child and an adult. In the process of this type of activity, the child appropriates the socially developed ways of using objects. An adult shows the baby how to use the surrounding objects, while explaining why the object is needed.

Objective activity

The scheme of the social situation can be drawn up as follows: “child – OBJECT – adult”. The most important in this triad is the subject. This can be verified by observing a child engaged in some kind of subject. He constantly looks at him. The degree of concentration is still small, but it reaches maximum concentration, and the child’s attention is focused only on the object of interest. But without an adult, the child is not able to use the object for its intended purpose. An adult is an obligatory partner of objective activity, a role model and a source of emotional stimulation. The child must be praised for his successes and achievements. The joint action of a child and an adult is mediated by an object, hence a new form of communication appears, a situational business one. In practice, the adult cooperates with the child regarding actions with objects. This activity has a motive, it is the subject itself and its study. Communication lies in the fact that objective activity is organized. An adult explains, shows: how to do it right, why you need it, when to do it. During this period, communication is very active and intense, and most importantly, verbal.

Note 1

As a way of teaching a baby, there is a “reversed display” – a presentation with an object involving the child in action.

By the second year of life, the child has received almost all the information about objects in the home environment, and he understands that each object is needed for something. There is a need to find out the functions of a new object. There is no guarantee at all that the child will use the item for its intended purpose, but he will know when and where to do it correctly. For example, a toddler can construct something with pencils, knowing that they are needed for drawing and writing. This is called object-manipulative play. At first, the action and the subject are closely related, but then there is a separation of the subject and the action. There are three main phases of the connection between the object and the action:

• any actions are performed with the object;
• use of the object only for its intended purpose;
• free use of the subject with knowledge of the true purpose.

Development of objective activity

DB Elkonin singled out two directions for the development of objective activity:

1. From joint action with an adult to independent implementation. This path was explored by I.A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov, who showed that at first orientation, execution and evaluation belong to an adult. Then a partial joint action is performed. And only then, the child performs the action independently on the basis of a demonstration, a verbal indication.
2. In carrying out the action, the means and methods of orienting the child develop. This development goes through several stages. At the first stage, the tools are used non-specifically (object manipulation). The item can also be used in unformed ways of using it. For example, a child knows what a mug is for, but substitutes it with the bottom up. At the first stage, mastering the methods of use occurs. The second stage is characterized by the fact that the child transfers actions from one object to another. For example, understanding how and when to put on shoes, the child tries to put on the ball when he is going to walk with it. At the third stage, there is a game action. Here, an adult does not tell you how to play and what to do. The child begins to compare the properties of objects with operations. Here, instrumental and correlative actions become the leading types of activity at an early age.

Correlative actions mean that several objects are brought into interaction (collection of pyramids, cubes).

Definition 1

Weapon actions is the use of an object when influencing other objects.

A child masters such actions under the guidance of an adult. Looking at adults, children begin to perform the same actions with toys. Other items or objects available to the child can serve as substitutes. This is a very important indicator of development – the sign function of consciousness is being born. The child begins to understand that one object can mean another, and this is a prerequisite for the formation of a playful, productive, educational activity.

Author:
Anna Kovrova

Lecturer, Faculty of Psychology, Department of General Psychology. Candidate of Psychological Sciences

Early childhood (from 1 year to 3 years) – Center for Psychological, Pedagogical, Medical and Social Assistance

EARLY CHILDHOOD (FROM 1 YEAR TO 3 YEARS)

Social situation of development

Early childhood is the period from 1 to 3 years. At this age, changes occur in personal development, the cognitive sphere, and the social situation of development.

Neoplasms of infancy lead to the fact that the relationship between the child and the adult changes, which in turn leads to the formation of a new social situation of development, which consists in the emergence of a joint activity of a child and an adult, and also in the fact that this activity becomes objective.

The essence of joint activity is the assimilation of socially developed ways of using objects, that is, an adult teaches the child to use the surrounding objects correctly, and also explains why they are needed and where they should be used.

The social situation of a child’s development at this age looks like this: “Child – OBJECT – adult”. As can be seen from this triad, the subject is important for the child. You can be convinced of this by watching how the child plays: he constantly looks at the object that he is passionate about, be it a typewriter, chair, doll, spoon, etc. You may get the feeling that he does not need anything else and no one is needed, his attention is focused only on the object of passion. But this is not so, because without an adult, a child cannot master human ways of using objects.

Joint activity becomes objective, because the motive of this activity lies in the object itself and the way it is used. Communication at this age takes the form of organizing objective activity. In other words, it occurs at the moment of explaining the correctness of the use of one or another object. Communication develops intensively and becomes verbal, because mastering objects using only emotional coloring cannot be effective.

Development of the child’s cognitive sphere

Perception, thinking, memory, and speech develop at this age. This process is characterized by the verbalization of cognitive processes and the emergence of their arbitrariness.

The development of perception is determined by three parameters: perceptual actions (the integrity of the perceived object), sensory standards (the emergence of sensation standards: sound, light, taste, tactile, olfactory) and mapping actions. In other words, the process of perception consists in highlighting the most characteristic qualities, attributes, properties for a given object or situation; drawing up on their basis a certain image; correlation of these standard images with objects of the surrounding world. This is how a child learns to divide objects into classes: dolls, cars, balls, spoons, etc.

The process of cognition of the surrounding world begins to develop actively from the year. A child aged from one to two years old uses different options to perform the same action, and from one and a half to two years old he has the ability to solve a problem by guessing (insight), i.e. the child suddenly finds a solution to this problem, avoiding the trial and error method.

From the second year of life, the child’s perception changes. Having learned to influence one object on another, he is able to foresee the outcome of the situation, for example, the possibility of dragging a ball through a hole, moving one object with the help of another, etc. The child can distinguish between such shapes as a circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle, polygon; colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

Due to the development of perception, by the end of early age, the child begins to develop mental activity. This is expressed in the emergence of the ability to generalize, to transfer the experience gained from the initial conditions to new ones, to establish a connection between objects through experimentation, memorizing them and using them in solving problems. A one and a half year old child can predict and indicate the direction of movement of an object, the location of a familiar object, overcome obstacles on the way to achieving the desired goal. And after a year and a half there is a reaction of choosing an object according to the most striking and simple features: shape and color.

In early childhood, the development of thinking continues , which gradually passes from the visual-active into the visual-figurative, that is, actions with material objects are replaced by actions with images. The internal development of thinking proceeds in this way: intellectual operations develop and concepts are formed.

Visual-effective thinking arises by the end of the first year of life and remains leading up to 3.5-4 years. At first, the child can abstract and highlight the shape and color, therefore, when grouping objects, he first of all pays attention to the size and color of the object. At the age of about two years, he identifies objects based on essential and non-essential features. At 2.5 years old, the child distinguishes objects according to essential features: color, shape, size.

A feature of thinking in early childhood is its indivisibility. The child, solving the problem, does not single out individual parameters in it, perceiving the situation as a complete picture.

The role of an adult in this case is to extract from the situation and analyze individual details, from which the child will then single out the main and secondary ones.

Visual-figurative thinking occurs at the age of 2.5–3 years and remains the leading one until the age of 6–6.5 years. The formation of this thinking is associated with the formation of elementary self-consciousness and the beginning of the development of the ability for arbitrary self-regulation, accompanied by a developed imagination.

Development of memory. By the age of two, a child develops working memory. Light logical and thematic games are available to him, he can draw up an action plan for a short period of time, does not forget the goal set a few minutes ago.

Speech development. Up to a year, a child can already call a spade a spade. He has rich experience in learning about the world around him, he has an idea about his parents, food, environment, toys. And yet, out of the multitude of qualities contained in a word as a concept, the child at first assimilates only individual properties characteristic of the object with which this word was initially associated in his perception.

A one-year-old child reacts to words as to the situation as a whole. The word turns out to be associated with the situation, and not with the object representing it. The child carefully observes the facial expressions and gestures of the speaking adult, catching on them the meaning of what is being said.

At the age of 3, a child learns to use cases correctly, begins to use first one-word sentences, then, at the age of 1.5 to 2.5 years, can combine words, combining them into two-three-word phrases or two-word sentences, where there is both a subject and a predicate. Then, thanks to the development of the grammatical structure of speech, he masters all cases and is able to build complex sentences with the help of function words. At the same time, there is a conscious control over the correct pronunciation of speech statements.

After 1.5 years, the activity of independent speech and verbal communication is noted. The child begins to ask for the names of objects or phenomena that interest him. At first, he uses the language of gestures, facial expressions and pantomimes or a pointing gesture, and then a question expressed in verbal form is added to the gesture.

The child learns to control the behavior of other people with the help of speech. But a child between the ages of 2.5 and 3 years cannot follow the instructions of adults, especially when it is necessary to choose one action from several; he will be able to make this choice only closer to 4 years.

During the second year of life, the child begins to learn the verbal designation of surrounding objects, and then the names of adults, the names of toys, and only then – parts of the body, i. e. nouns, and by the age of two, with normal development, he understands the meaning of almost all words related to the surrounding reality. This is facilitated by the development of the semantic function of children’s speech, i.e., the definition of the meaning of a word, its differentiation, clarification, and the assignment to words of generalized meanings that are associated with them in the language.

By the age of 2, children have a clear understanding of the purpose of the household and personal hygiene items around them. They understand general questions that require a yes or no answer.

At about 3 years old, the child begins to listen attentively to what adults are talking about, loves when stories, fairy tales, and poems are read to him.

Until the age of 1.5, a child learns from 30 to 100 words, but rarely uses them. By the age of 2, he knows 300 words, and by 3 – 1200-1500 words.

The main trends in the development of the speech of a young child are as follows.

• Passive speech is ahead of active speech in development.

• The child discovers that each object has its own name.

• At the border of the 2nd and 3rd years of life, the child intuitively “discovers” that the words in the sentence are related.

• There is a transition from the ambiguity of children’s words to the first functional generalizations built on the basis of practical actions.

• Phonemic hearing is ahead of the development of articulation. The child first learns to listen to speech correctly, and then to speak correctly.

• Mastering the syntactic structure of the language.

• The functions of speech develop, there is a transition from the indicative (indicative) to the nominative (denoting) function of speech.

Personal education

In early childhood, along with the development of the cognitive sphere, personal development also takes place. First of all, the child’s personal socialization takes place, because, observing adults, he tries to imitate them: to do as they do, to behave as they behave in certain situations. The process of imitation goes through communication and interaction between an adult and a child.

Observing the behavior of people and imitating them becomes one of the main sources of personal socialization of the child.

An important role in the development of personality is played by the feeling of attachment, which is formed in a child by the end of the first year of life and continues to develop in early childhood. The reason for attachment may lie in the fact that adults satisfy the basic needs of the child, reduce their anxiety, provide a safe environment for existence and active study of the surrounding reality, form the basis for normal relationships with people at a more mature age.

When the mother is near the child, the child is more active and prone to exploring the environment. A positive assessment of the actions and personal qualities of the child by the parent forms in him a sense of self-confidence, faith in his abilities and capabilities. If a child is attached to his parents and they pay him the same, then he is more obedient and disciplined. If parents are friendly, attentive and strive to meet the needs of the child, then he develops a personal, personal attachment.

If a child is deprived of constant positive emotional contact with his mother or close people, then he will later have problems in establishing normal, trusting relationships with others.

In early childhood, the formation of self-consciousness takes place. The development of self-awareness will lead to the formation of self-esteem. Development of independence is noted. The phrase “I myself” is the best way to describe its manifestation. The child does not always want to be helped. Having mastered walking, he finds himself obstacles, obstacles and tries to overcome them. All this gives the child pleasure and indicates that he begins to develop such qualities as willpower, perseverance, determination.

At this age, many children show disobedience. When they are told that it is impossible to do this, they continue to do it their own way. Often this is due to the desire of children to know the world around them as quickly as possible.

From the age of 1.5, the child begins to realize his abilities and his own personality traits. A two-year-old child understands that he can influence people and achieve the desired goal.

Children begin to develop empathy – understanding the emotional state of another person. One can observe how a one and a half year old child strives to console an upset person: he hugs him, kisses him, gives him a toy, etc.

The child develops a need to achieve success. This requirement is formed in stages. First, the child begins to realize his successes and failures, then he can explain the successes and failures of other people, then he acquires the ability to distinguish tasks according to the degree of difficulty and evaluate the degree of development of his own skills necessary to complete this task, and, finally, he can evaluate his abilities and efforts.