Research Findings: Trust is considered to be a crucial element of effective parent-preschool partnerships and an important prerequisite of parental involvement in their children's educational processes. The present study examines the role of child and family characteristics and aspects of parent-preschool communication in parents' trust. 735…

Teaching is an emotionally demanding profession, and teachers' ability to manage their emotions appears to be linked to their occupational well-being. Kindergarten teachers experience intense and frequent emotional interactions in their daily work; however, studies on kindergarten teachers' emotional labor are still rare. Because social…

Research Findings: The present study examined the transition practices reported by 59 pre-kindergarten (pre-k) and 186 kindergarten teachers in the rural Southeastern United States, and asked if transition practices related to skills at the beginning and end of kindergarten for 387 children. Analyses indicated kindergarten teachers offered more…

Research Findings: The parental role in supporting young children's oral language development at home is crucial for children's language and literacy development. However, there is limited expertise in how teachers can support lower-educated parents effectively to enhance their interactions with their children and stimulate the use of language.…

Research Findings: Teaching is a highly stressful profession due to many stressors that teachers experience. To understand how early childhood teachers internally handle work climate-related stressors, we examined associations between teacher-perceived work climate, teachers' use of emotion regulation strategies, and the degree of stress that…

Social-behavioral functioning during early childhood is associated with children's academic and social success concurrently and over time. This study explored how concurrent, year-to-year, and sustained parent--teacher and student--teacher relationships predicted children's social skills and problem behaviors across the preschool to Grade 1…

Research Findings: This study aims to validate the Parent Satisfaction with Education Experiences Scale (PSEE) and to explore parental satisfaction with early childhood education service in urban China. Altogether 27,515 Chinese parents who were randomly sampled from 12 cities of China completed the survey. First, the exploratory and confirmatory…

Research Findings: This small-scale study features the 1st comparative exploration of the pedagogical quality of parent-led child care and regular child care in The Netherlands. The quality of the interaction skills and the affective relationships between adults and children was evaluated and compared with those of regular child care centers. On…

Research Findings: This study examined correlates of parents' reported school engagement in an ethnically diverse, rural sample (N = 346) of parents and teachers in kindergarten through Grade 2. Of particular interest were role expectations and family-school relationships in American Indian families, who historically have been marginalized by…

Research Findings: Outdoor play is important for children's health and development, yet many preschool-age children in child care settings do not receive the recommended 60 min/day of outdoor play. Child care providers have previously described parent-related barriers to increasing outdoor playtime, including parents not providing appropriate…

Research Findings: The study examined the beliefs of kindergarten teachers (K-teachers) regarding the goals of kindergarten. We asked K-teachers to reflect on their own beliefs, their understanding of parents' beliefs, and their understanding of the beliefs that guide agents of the education system. We further examined differences between…

Parental mentalizing, which is the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental states and to reflect this back to a child through speech, is a key construct in child development. Adults with high mentalization promote children's secure attachment, mentalization and self-regulation. This study describes this competency in a sample of…

Research Findings: The amount and quality of communication between staff and guardians in child care centers was examined using extensive naturalistic observations. Interactions between staff and more than 1,000 guardians who dropped their child off at their child care center were captured through a series of 20-s time-sampled observations.…

Research Findings: The present study concerns children's behavioral adjustment in the context of pre-primary schools in Tanzania. Twenty teachers and 320 children from 20 pre-primary schools participated in the study. Teacher-child relationships, children's behavioral adjustment, and teachers' cultural beliefs were reported by teachers; classroom…

Research Findings: Social-emotional competence is especially important for children living in poverty, and effective assessment of social-emotional skills is critical. This study examined parent-teacher agreement and reliability of the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA; P. A. LeBuffe & J. A. Naglieri, 1999) English and Spanish forms in a…