Session: Taking the Long View: Examining Contextual Contributors to Early Childhood Teacher’s Social-Emotional Wellbeing As Early Prevention for Children’s Social-Emotional Adjustment (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

SESSION INTRODUCTION: In early care and education settings, teachers’ are key architects of environments that can promote or suppress children’s positive social-emotional development. Although research has begun to examine the link between teachers’ well-being and children’s outcomes (e.g., Jeon, Buettner, & Snyder, 2014), less attention has been paid to antecedents of teachers’ mental health. The goal of this symposium session is to present a series of findings on contextual contributors to early childhood educators’ social-emotional wellbeing as well as young children’s social-emotional adjustment.

Using data from 1,129 pre-school teachers, the first paper, “The Effects of Work Climate on Teachers’ Stress: Mediating Role of Teachers’ Emotion Regulation,” examined the role of child-care climate, including working conditions, relationships with parents, and perceived child behaviors, in teachers’ psychological health and wellbeing.

The second paper, “Childcare Chaos and Teacher Wellbeing: The Presence of Children with Disabilities,” investigated how the presence of children with special needs predicts teachers’ psychological wellbeing through environmental climate, measured by childcare chaos.

The third paper, “Associations between Preschool Teachers’ Opportunities for Professional Development, Motivation, and Commitment,” studied program-level professional development conditions in relation to teachers’ motivation and commitment.

The fourth paper, “Associations between Teachers’ Stress, Child-center Beliefs, Reflective Practice and Responsiveness to Children’s Negative Emotions” examined the extent to which teachers’ stress and beliefs predict their classroom practice, including reflective practice and responsiveness to children. 

Extending the findings to teachers in infant-toddler classrooms, the fifth paper, “Examining Infant-Toddler Teachers’ Attachment Style, Teacher-Child Relationships, and Children’s Social-Emotional Adjustment,” found that teachers’ attachment anxiety was associated with conflicts with children, which in turn predicted more externalizing problems and dysregulation in children.

The sixth paper, “Family Childcare Providers’ Personal Stress, Stress from Work-to-Family Conflict, and their Relationship with Children,” extended the findings from center-based early childhood teachers to family childcare providers. The paper found that family childcare providers’ psychological health, including personal stress and stress from work-to-family conflict, is related to their relationship with children.