Snippets:
- Social understanding is particularly important because of the social nature of humans and human life, even in early infancy.
- Social-emotional development includes the child’s experience, expression, and management of emotions and the ability to establish positive and rewarding relationships with others.
- Emotions and social behaviors affect the young child’s ability to persist in goal-oriented activity, to seek help when it is needed, and to participate in and benefit from relationships.
- Since human life is relationship-based, one vitally important function of empathy over the life span is to strengthen social bonds.
- Infants experience, express, and perceive emotions before they fully understand them.
- Emotion and cognition work together, jointly informing the child’s impressions of situations and influencing behavior.
- Together, emotion and cognition contribute to attentional processes, decision making, and learning.
- Cognitive processes, such as decision making, are affected by emotion.
- Young children are particularly attuned to social and emotional stimulation.
- Early relationships are so important to developing infants that research experts have broadly concluded that, in the early years, “nurturing, stable and consistent relationships are the key to healthy growth, development and learning” .
- Experiences with family members and teachers provide an opportunity for young children to learn about social relationships and emotions through exploration and predictable interactions.
- How teachers interact with children is at the very heart of early childhood education.
- One study suggests that one way to support the development of empathy in young children is to create a culture of caring in the early childhood environment.
- Interactions are stepping-stones to relationships. We, as teachers, need to facilitate the development of a psychologically safe environment that promotes positive social interaction.
- Adults can provide positive role models of emotion regulation through their behavior and through the verbal and emotional support they offer children in managing their emotions.
- At kindergarten entry, children demonstrate broad variability in their ability to self-regulate.
- Early childhood support later positive learning outcomes in all domains by maintaining a focus on the promotion of healthy social emotional development.