A Process Model of Reflective Emotion Regulation in Preschool Teacher-Child Interactions

The current study examines how early childhood teachers support children during everyday emotion episodes in ECEC settings that challenge children’s emotion regulation. Drawing on a process model of reflective emotion regulation, we focus on three steps, namely (1) teachers’ initial emotion coaching, (2) their adaptive co-regulation and (3) their co-implementation by ensuring children’s agreement with the intended resolution and checking its implementation. Extensive video observations of everyday activities were conducted in 18 ECEC classrooms. We identified and analyzed 473 emotion episodes involving teacher interventions (N = 48 teachers; 87.5% female; all white) after a child expressed anger or sadness (N = 213 children aged 2-6 years old; 51.4% male). Multilevel regressions show that, first, teachers’ initial emotion coaching was positively associated with co-regulation fit and, second, a better co-regulation fit predicted a more successful co-implementation.