“Together Like a Family”: A Qualitative Case Study of Teachers’ Emotion Socialization in a Preschool Community

Preschool provides an opportunity for children to explore emotions, social relationships, community participation, and cultural values. In these early years, a primary task of emotional development occurs through emotion socialization, which refers to the processes through which individuals learn the skills, behaviors, and social understandings relevant to becoming emotionally competent members of their social groups and cultures. In the preschool context, teachers’ emotion socialization is important to understand, as it contributes to children’s emotion competence which is associated with a range of outcomes. However, children’s emotional development in preschool can be disrupted, as suspensions and expulsions in preschool occur at a rate four times higher than in the K-12 system. These disciplinary measures can result from the provision of ineffective responses to children’s “challenging behaviors,” which often arise from children’s difficult emotions. Emotion socialization may ultimately determine whether children and families are welcomed to, or expelled from, their early childhood educational programs. The present qualitative case study examined teachers’ emotion socialization in a predominately Latinx preschool community. The “case” was defined to include teachers’ and the director’s: (a) professional journeys, (b) emotional experiences in relation to their work, (c) understandings of emotion socialization and children’s socioemotional development, and (d) emotion socialization practices. I conducted classroom observations, interviews with seven teachers and the school director, and an analysis of the book, FLIP IT!, a manual for a socioemotional approach (Sperry, 2011). I found that teachers drew from all aspects of community cultural wealth in their professional journeys. Teachers and their director engaged in theory-building, and prioritized building relationships in their work. Teachers’ experienced emotional suffering, stemming from anxieties regarding children’s challenging behaviors. When children experienced challenges, teachers focused on limit setting rather than addressing children’s emotional and social experiences, and both children and teachers had a threshold for their capacity to handle challenges within this limit-focused approach. Despite these challenges, teachers found great enjoyment and meaning from their work with children. These results suggest that intervention efforts be created in partnership with ECEC communities, to expand emotional repertoires and better support diversity, equity, and inclusion