Introduction to Preschool During the Covid-19-Pandemic: Impacts of Social Restrictions on Staff-Family Relational Establishment

The social restrictions during the covid-19 pandemic have challenged many aspects of preschool everyday life. Particularly vulnerable to these restrictions is the aspect of introducing new children to preschool, since preschool introduction constitutes a natural arena for establishment of preschool staff’s relationships with children and their parents. Organizing the preschool introduction to enable constructive relationship-building between preschool staff and the families, is, thus, crucial, not the least as recent attachment research suggest that preschool staff in early childhood education and care contexts can contribute to attachment development in children. In Sweden, preschools stayed open during the pandemic of covid-19, however with implementation of several social restrictions, such as physical distancing between preschool staff and parents. It is therefore crucial to understand whether, and how, these pandemic-related social restrictions have affected the prerequisites for facilitating good interactions between preschool staff and the families. Based on analysis of open-ended survey data (N = 465), the present study explored how Swedish preschool staff experienced and dealt with the pandemic restrictions during preschool introduction. Our qualitative analysis resulted in three categories and six subcategories, including results demonstrating that social distancing-restrictions accentuated the importance of engaging relationally with the families, while simultaneously constituting a disconcerting complication since the physical distance constrained the relationship-building between staff and parents. Moreover, the children seemed to interpret the parent-staff physical distance as relational distance, which negatively affected their emerging relationship to preschool staff. Our results also showed that it might be of special concern, also in a non-pandemic context, to consider the organization of parental participation, as it may be of critical importance for staff-child relational establishment. Lastly, to promote engagement of preschool staff, our results indicated that it might be essential to have reflexively defined procedures when introducing children to preschool