After reading and watching the content for this module, provide a 1-2 page response to the following prompts: What did you already know about social and emotional development in infants a

5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return

from Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND)

Child-adult relationships that are responsive and attentive—with lots of back and forth interactions—build a strong foundation in a child’s brain for all future learning and development. This is called “serve and return,” and it takes two to play! Follow these 5 steps to practice serve and return with your child.

Serve and return interactions make

everyday moments fun and become second nature with practice.

1

Notice the serve and share the child’s focus

of attention.

( 2 ) Return the serve

by supporting and encouraging.

By taking small moments during the day to do serve and return, you build up the foundation for children’s lifelong learning, behavior, and health—and their skills for facing life’s challenges.

For more on serve and return: tinyurl.com/serve-return

Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) is a video coaching program that aims to strengthen positive interactions between caregivers and children. FIND was developed by Dr. Phil Fisher and colleagues in Eugene, Oregon.

For more about FIND: tinyurl.com/find-program

Is the child looking or pointing at something? Making a sound or facial expression? Moving her arms and legs? That’s a serve. The key is to pay attention to what the child is focused on. You can’t spend all your time doing this, so look for small opportunities throughout the day—like while you’re getting him dressed or waiting in line at the store.

WHY? By noticing serves, you’ll learn a lot about a child’s abilities, interests, and needs. You’ll encourage her to explore and you’ll strengthen the bond between you.

You can offer comfort with a hug and gentle words, help him, play with him, or acknowledge him. You can make a sound or facial expression —like saying, “I see!” or smiling and nodding to let him know you’re noticing the same thing. Or you can pick up the object he’s pointing to and give it to him.

WHY? Supporting and encouraging rewards a child’s interests and curiosity. Never getting a return can actually be stressful for a child. When you return the serve, the child knows that his thoughts and feelings are heard and understood.

developingchild.harvard.edu PAGE I OF 2 Center on the Developing Child ф HARVARD UNIVERSITY

5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return

from Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND)

Did you know that building a child’s developing brain can be as simple as playing a game of peek-a-boo?

ų 3 ) Give it

a name! Take turns…and wait. Keep the interaction going back and forth.

k 5 У Practice

endings and beginnings.

When you return a child’s serve by naming what she is seeing, doing, or feeling, you make important language connections in her brain, even before she can talk or understand your words. You can name anything—a person, a thing, an action, a feeling, or a combination. If a child points to her feet, you can also point to them and say, “Yes, those are your feet!”

WHY? When you name what a child is focused on, you help her understand the world around her and help her know what to expect. Naming also gives her words to use herself and lets her know you care.

Every time you return a serve, give the child a chance to respond. Taking turns can be quick (from the child to you and back again) or go on for many turns. Waiting is crucial. Children need time to form their responses, especially when they’re learning so many things at once. Waiting helps keep the turns going.

WHY? Taking turns helps children learn self-control and how to get along with others. By waiting, you give the child time to develop his ideas and build his confidence and independence. Waiting also helps you understand his needs.

Children signal when they’re done or ready to move on to a new activity. They might let go of a toy, pick up a new one, or turn to look at something else. Or they may walk away, start to fuss, or say, “All done!” When you share a child’s focus, you’ll notice when she’s ready to end the activity and begin something new.

WHY? When you can find moments for a child to take the lead, you support her in exploring her world—and make more serve and return interactions possible.

developingchild.harvard.edu PAGE 2 OF 2 Center on the Developing Child ф HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ResearchGate

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253323393

Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development Through Preschool Education

Article · January 2005

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NEER Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development Through Preschool Education by Judi Boyd, W. Steven Barnett, Elena Bodrova, Deborah J. Leong, and Deanna Gomby

Children need a combination of intellectual skills, motivational qualities, and socioemotional skills to succeed in school.1 They must be able to understand the feelings of others, control their own feelings and behaviors, and get along with their peers and teachers. Children need to be able to cooperate, follow directions, demonstrate self-control, and “pay attention.” Unfortunately, many students preschool experiences do not fully support their social and emotional development. This policy brief describes the importance of social and emotional development for children in their earliest years and as they grow older and describes the characteristics of those preschool education programs that best support these aspects of development.

What We Know:

National Institute for Early Education Research

Contact Us: 120 Albany Street Suite 500 New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Tel 732 932-4350 Fax 732 932-4360

www.nieer.org

THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY

RUTGERS

• Kindergarten teachers say that about 20 percent of children entering kindergarten do not yet have the necessary social and emotional skills to be “ready” for school. Of very low-income children, as many as 30 percent may not have the necessary skills.

• Social and emotional development is important both in its own right and because aspects of it facilitate cognitive development.

• When children are young, the adults around them (parents, other adult care­ givers, preschool teachers) are the most important influences on their social and emotional development.

• High-quality preschool education can sup­ port early development in ways that yield long-term social and emotional benefits. A significant part of the long-term economic pay-off to public investments in high-quali­ ty preschool programs can come from their social outcomes, including the prevention of crime and delinquency.

Policy Recommendations: • Establish as a key goal of preschool

education programs enhancing social and emotional development,without de-emphasizing cognitive development. Both domains are important, and neither should be sacrificed for the other.

• Include in learning standards the outcomes that preschool programs are expected to achieve for social and emotional development.

• Expand access to high-quality preschool education so that more children can benefit from experiences that will improved their social and emotional development.

• Ensure that preschool education programs are high-quality because only high-quality programs adequately support children’s social and emotional development.

• Provide administrators and teachers with technical assistance and training to help them implement effective curricula and teaching practices supporting social and emotional development.

Knowing the ABCs is not enough. To be prepared for school, children also must be excited and curious about learning and confident that they can succeed (motivational qualities). They must be able to understand the feelings of others, control their own feelings and behaviors, and get along with their peers and teachers (socioemotional skills). Indeed, kindergarten teachers rate these motivational and socioemo- tional skills as more important to school success than being able to hold a pencil or read.2 They want chil­ dren to be ready for learning—to be able to cooperate, follow directions, demonstrate self-control, and “pay attention.”

Unfortunately, kindergarten teachers report that many of their students are not socially or emotionally prepared for the challenges of the new environment.3 Kindergarten teachers rate about 20 percent of all entering kindergarteners and 30 percent of very low-income entering kindergarteners as having poor social development.4 They enter kindergarten unable to learn because they cannot pay attention, remember information on purpose, or function socially in a school environment.5 The result is growing numbers of children who are hard to manage in the classroom.6,7 These children cannot get along with each other, follow directions, or delay gratification. They show belligerence and aggression in the classroom and on the playground. The problems begin before kindergarten: In some studies as many as 32 percent of preschoolers in Head Start programs have behavioral problems.8

The core features of emotional

development include the ability to

identify and understand one’s own

feelings, to accurately read and

comprehend emotional states in others,

to manage strong emotions and their

expression in a constructive manner,

to regulate one’s own behavior, to

develop empathy for others and to

establish and sustain relationships.

—National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2005)

These missing social and emotional skills mean that teachers spend too much of their time trying to rein in unmanageable children and too little time teaching.9 Early childhood teachers report that they are extremely concerned about growing classroom management problems,10, 11 and that they are ill-equipped to handle them.12 Kindergarten teachers report that more than half of their students come to school unprepared for learning academic subjects.13 If these problems are not addressed, the result can be growing aggression, behavioral problems and, for some, delinquency and crime through the school years and into adolescence and adulthood.

Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development Through Preschool [2]

Social and Emotional Development: Definitions and Importance Social and emotional development involves the acquisition of a set of skills. Key among them are the ability to: • identify and understand one’s own feelings, • accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others, • manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner, • regulate one’s own behavior, • develop empathy for others, and • establish and sustain relationships.14

Each of these skills develops on its own timetable, but the skills build on one another. Very young chil­ dren, for example, have to learn to understand and recognize their own feelings, but then they gradually learn to associate verbal labels to those feelings, to learn that others have feelings too, and to begin to empathize with others. As children grow older, they learn to manage their emotions—to shake off feelings of anxiety, sadness, or frustration, and to delay gratification in order to achieve a goal.15 As adults, those skills help differentiate the mediocre salesman from the successful one who can read the emotional response of a prospective client. They help athletes persevere until they win their gold medals. They help spouses empathize with one another to de-escalate arguments, and they impel good citizens to shy away from injuring others because they can understand how such actions would cause pain.

One of the most important skills that children develop is self-regulation—the ability to manage one’s behavior so as to withstand impulses, maintain focus, and undertake tasks even if there are other more enticing alternatives available. Self-regulation underlies the ability to undertake every task, so that it has implications for not just how children get along with one another but also how they can focus and learn in the classroom. (See sidebar, p. 4.)

In short, these skills help promote a range of positive behaviors, beginning before children enter kinder­ garten and extending into adult life. Not surprisingly, when social and emotional development goes awry, the result can be problems in school and later life.

Problems in Social and Emotional Development: The Beginnings of Aggression Persistent physical aggression, high-school dropout rates, adolescent delinquency, and antisocial behavior have all been associated with early childhood conduct problems.16 The preschool years are a “sensitive period” for learning to regulate development of aggression.17 Children who exhibit high levels of physical aggression in elementary school are at the highest risk of engaging in violent behavior as adolescents. Researchers believe that children with difficult, disruptive behavior (poor social and emotional skills) are at risk for these later problems for at least three reasons: (1) teachers find it harder to teach them, seeing them as less socially and academically competent, and therefore provide them with less positive feedback; (2) peers reject them, which cuts off an important avenue for learning and emotional support; and (3) children faced with this rejection from peers and teachers tend to dislike school and learning, which leads to lower school attendance and poorer outcomes.18, 19

Because difficult behavior exhibits itself early—even before children begin kindergarten—the pattern of rejection and negative experiences begins early, too.20 The early experience of rejection can have lasting emotional and behavioral impacts beyond elementary school, creating a downward spiral that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development Through Preschool [3]

Social-Emotional Self-Regulation: A Key to School Readiness

One of the most important skills that children must develop is self-regulation. Self-regulation is a deep, internal mechanism that underlies the mindful, planful, and thoughtful behaviors of all children. It underlies performance in all domains, from reading to getting along well with others.

Self-regulation is the capacity to control one’s impulses both to stop doing something that is unnec­ essary (even if one wants to continue doing it), and to start doing something that is needed (even if one does not want to do it). This ability to inhibit one response and to enact another on-demand is a skill used in thinking as well as social interactions. The child who does not have self-regulation at 5 years of age is the child who cannot follow the teacher’s directions at age 6 or who cannot plan how to solve a problem at age 7. The child without self-regulation of emotions at age 4 will not be able to control his temper at 5 and will have negative peer interactions at age 7.

Self-Regulation and School Readiness Self-regulation is necessary for positive social relations with others and for successful learning. To learn anything in a school setting, a child has to ignore the child next to him who is fun to play with and make his mind concentrate on the story the teacher is reading. The abilities to pay attention and to remember things on purpose are also part of self-regulation.21

The role of self-regulation in school success—from preschool and kindergarten to middle and high school—has now been documented in a number of studies.22 Levels of self-regulation actually predict school success in first grade over and above children’s cognitive skills and family background.23 Cognitive self-regulation is linked with students’ achievement in school.24 Children lacking emotional self-regulation are at higher risk for disciplinary problems and are less likely to make a successful transition from preschool to kindergarten.25 Emotional self-regulation seems to play a part in child resiliency and later adjustment.26 Children who did not learn self-regulation in preschool can turn into bullies with aggressive habits of interaction that are difficult to break in later years.27, 28

New studies demonstrate that there is a physiological basis for the development of self-regulation. Brain research shows that self-regulation is linked to maturation of the prefrontal cortex area of the brain, which occurs during the preschool years.29, 30 Both emotional and cognitive self-regulation seem to have the same neural roots, making it possible for children to take control of both their thinking and their feelings as they grow older and their brains develop. Based on other brain research, we believe that preschoolers must practice self-regulation if they are to develop finely tuned skills. Generally, if children do not practice deliberate and purposeful behaviors, traces in the brain are not reinforced (“use it or lose it” principle). So, if preschoolers do not practice self-regulation enough, the related brain areas will not be fully developed, and the end result may be adults who still act like they are in their “terrible twos.”

Practice Makes Perfect Evidence indicates that self-regulation and impulse control does not emerge spontaneously, but is learned.31 Most important, it can be learned not just in families, but also in preschool classrooms. In fact, in many good quality programs, children do learn self-regulation. In these high-quality pre­ school programs, teachers set up the preschool environment so that children begin to think ahead, to plan their activities, and to think about and use strategies to solve social problems.32

Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development Through Preschool [4]

Without intervention, the troubles born out of problems in social and emotional development create high costs for society in terms of juvenile delinquency and adult crime. Close to 2.3 million juveniles were arrested in 2002,33 more than 134,000 juveniles were held in residential facilities in 1999, and about 12,000 juveniles were incarcerated in adult jails or state prisons as of mid-year 2000.34 At year-end 2003, 6.9 million persons (3.2 percent of all U.S. adults) were on probation, parole, or in prison or jail.35

How Social and Emotional Skills Develop Promoting social and emotional development and preventing problems caused by maladaptive develop­ ment is clearly important to individuals and to society, but how do those socio-emotional skills develop? They begin with the relationships children form with the people around them, including parents, care­ givers, and peers.

The Role of Parents Parents and families play an enormous role in shaping a child’s social and emotional development. Early relationships with parents lay the foundation on which social competency and peer relationships are built. Parents who support positive emotional development interact with their children affectionately; show consideration for their feelings, desires and needs; express interest in their daily activities; respect their viewpoints; express pride in their accomplishments; and provide encouragement and support dur­ ing times of stress.36 This support greatly increases the likelihood that children will develop early emo­ tional competence, will be better prepared to enter school, and less likely to display behavior problems at home and at school.37 This is why many preschool programs include a focus on parent involvement and parenting education.

The Role of Teachers/Early Childhood Educators Most children spend many hours each week in the care of someone other than their parents. These care­ givers play the same role in promoting social and emotional development as do parents when children are young. Just as parents who are warm and responsive are more likely to promote strong social and emotional skills in their children, so too are early childhood educators and teachers, which means that the classroom environment must enable teachers the time to focus on individual children. Just as it is important for a consistent attachment to form

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