7.2: Guiding Principles for Supporting Social and Emotional Development

Early learning is supported by attention to social-emotional development. Rather than taking time away from activities promoting learning and thinking, attention to the development of self, social interactions, and relationships is an essential component of an early childhood curriculum designed to promote learning in all young children. Here are some guiding principles on how to do that:

• Support social-emotional development with intentionality and ample opportunities to practice skills
• Attend to the impact of overall program design on social-emotional development (how you group children, what you model, etc.)
• Utilize curriculum practices that support healthy social-emotional development, including:
  • allow many opportunities for practicing social interaction and relationship skills
  • provide support for the growth of age and developmentally appropriate self-regulation abilities
  • encourage curiosity and initiative
  • provide each child a network of nurturing, dependable adults who will actively support and scaffold his or her learning in a group setting
• The most effective approach is play-based active learning

Here are some additional strategies to support children’s social and emotional development:

• Create a program environment and daily routines that offer children opportunities for responsible and cooperative roles in the classroom or family child care community.
• Model desirable behavior and attitudes in interactions with children and other adults.
• Use the family culture to create bridges between the program and the home, supporting children’s pride in their family experience, and understand individual differences in background and viewpoint.
• Enlist adults as active co-explorers in children’s chosen activities.
• Encourage children’s ideas, initiative, and contributions to shared activities.
• Observe children attentively, as they play, to understand each child’s needs, interests, strengths, and areas of growth in social-emotional development.
• Establish developmentally and culturally appropriate expectations for children’s behavior, especially expectations for self-control and self-regulation.
• Narrate for children what they are observed doing and expressing, providing language to describe their thoughts and feelings and to clarify others’ feelings.
• Provide specific feedback to children about their efforts, reinforcing their choices that support learning and linking their actions to outcomes.
• Coach and guide children’s behavior by using positive, respectful phras­ing and tone to prompt problem solving and to give brief instructions and reminders.
• Help children to understand social cues (facial expressions, body language, tone of voice). This can be fostered by simply allowing the children to freely play with their peers (learning through experience), or by modeling your own thought processes by thinking out loud (“I wonder what it means when Hayden is crying?”)^[1]