Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Teacher-Child Relationships and Preschool Teachers’ Attributions: Relations with Preschool Children’s Emotion Regulation and Emotion Knowledge

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  • Emotional understanding is important for social connection and fulfilling relationships across the lifespan. Without these skills, relationships with others can feel chaotic, unpredictable, and unattainable, affecting a person’s health and well being. Early childhood is a critical time to learn and practice foundational emotional skills that build into skills needed to manage more complex social interactions. Young children build this skill set through interactions with their caregivers and environment. It is through these interactions that children learn what they need to know about their emotions and the emotions of others within the contexts in which they grow up. Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory and it’s PPCT model illustrate how children’s development is driven by interactions between the child and their environments. In this way, research on children’s socioemotional development shows that the quality of relationships between caregivers and children as well as how caregivers view children’s emotion-related behavior affects what children know about their emotions and the emotions of others (Arsenio & Lover, 1995; Bernier et al., 2010; Denham et al., 2002). For many children in the US, preschool teachers are an important part of this development, acting as caregivers who teach children about their emotional world (Bernier et al., 2015). Specifically, the quality of the relationship between a child and their preschool teacher affects socioemotional learning in that close relationships support the development of socioemotional skills such as emotion regulation, while conflictual relationships do not (Hamre & Pianta, 2001). Previous literature has also shown that how preschool teacher attributions for challenging behavior, or the teachers’ perceived rationale for challenging behaviors, influence a child’s emotional outcomes (Andreou & Rapi, 2010; Bernier et al., 2015). The current study uses secondary data that samples 11 teachers and 63 children in 10 preschool classrooms to assess whether the quality of the teacher-child relationship and teacher behavior attributions for challenging behaviors influence a child’s emotional knowledge and regulation. First, connections between teacher-child relationship quality and children’s emotion regulation and knowledge are explored. I hypothesize that close relationships with teachers will be positively associated with emotion regulation and knowledge. I also hypothesize that conflictual relationships will be negatively associated with emotion regulation and not associated with emotion knowledge (research question one). Regression analysis results indicate that teacher-reported teacher-child conflict predicts teacher-reported externalizing behaviors when controlling for teaching beliefs and practices as well as the child’s age and gender, but not direct assessments of emotion regulation and knowledge. Close teacher-child relationships did not predict differences in emotional knowledge or regulation. Further, since few studies have connected preschool teacher attributions for challenging behavior to emotion knowledge and regulation, I apply a descriptive case study approach to explore these constructs and provide a foundation for connections in future work (research question two). Based on theoretical foundations and some previous research, I posit an exploratory hypothesize that preschool teachers will generally attribute disruptive behavior to internal, stable, and controllable forces (high causal and high responsibility attributions for challenging behavior); further, high attributions will be visually connected to low emotion regulation skills and knowledge. Results from the case study indicate that preschool teacher causal attributions are moderate to high and visually linked to emotion knowledge as well as other classroom and teacher characteristics. Similarly, responsibility attributions are moderate and are visually connected to emotion knowledge and teacher-reported externalizing behaviors as well as other classroom and teacher characteristics. Results indicate that contextual characteristics of a teacher-child dyad influence relationships and children’s socioemotional development.
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