Understanding adult-child interaction quality as a context for children's self-regulatory and social development in school [electronic resource]

Children's self-regulation and social competence are widely recognized as a developmentally salient, interrelated set of skills that set the foundation for positive relationships with peers and teachers. Growing evidence suggests that children who can pay attention, inhibit impulses and interact appropriately with adults and peers are better poised to take advantage of learning opportunities in the classroom. Warm, sensitive, and supportive interactions with adult caregivers, both at home and at school, play a central role in shaping children's socio-emotional development. This dissertation examines children's self-regulation and social adjustment across early and middle childhood in the context of three types of adult-child interactions: (1) positive parent-child co-regulation, (2) parent emotion socialization practices, and (3) teachers' EF-related classroom behaviors and scaffolding practices. The first paper compares the methodological differences of employing dynamic, micro-social and global measures of positive co-regulation (PCR) as unique predictors of children's behavioral and social adjustment in the early school context. Micro-social PCR independently predicted fewer externalizing and inattention/impulsive behaviors in school. Global PCR did not uniquely relate to children's behavioral and social adjustment outcomes. Findings illustrate the importance of using dynamic measures of PCR based on micro-social coding to further understand how the quality of parent-child interactions is related to children's self-regulatory and social development during the transition to school. The second paper explores how the process of early school adjustment is not the same for all children by examining the interplay of early child emotional behavior problems, parent emotion socialization practices, and gender in predicting teacher-child closeness. I find that higher relational aggression was linked to closer teacher-child relationships for all children of parents who employed minimization as an emotion socialization practice. These findings contradict prior research linking supportive emotion socialization practices (e.g., empathy, comforting) to socio-emotional competence and unsupportive practices (e.g., minimization, punishment) to poor school adjustment. Together, results from this paper have implications for improving children's classroom experiences by identifying parent emotion socialization and gender as contexts for understanding child emotional behavior problems in relation to teacher-child closeness. The third paper introduces the Teachers' Displays and Scaffolding of Executive Function (T-DASEF) Protocol as a new classroom observation coding system for measuring how teachers display EF-related behaviors and scaffold students' EF skills in elementary school classrooms. I describe the processes of developing the T-DASEF protocol and evaluating the reliability of the dimensions derived from the protocol. I also examine the validity of measures of teachers' EF-related behaviors and scaffolding practices in predicting direct assessments of students' fall and spring EF skills. Findings indicate that the dimensions from the T-DASEF protocol reliably captured teachers' EF-related difficulties and scaffolding practices. Teachers' tendencies toward impulsive, distracted, or disorganized behaviors independently related to students' EF skills in the fall, but not in the spring. By comparison, teachers' cognitive flexibility and planning/organization scaffolding emerged as unique predictors of students' spring EF skills. These findings have implications for using ecologically-valid, observational measures to provide teachers with important feedback on their EF difficulties and how to improve scaffolding of students' EF-skills. Together, these papers advance our conceptual and methodological understanding of the role of adults' caregiving and teaching behaviors in supporting children's self-regulatory and social development in schools. Through this dissertation, I use a multi-method approach to offer new insights into the quality of the interactional processes through which adults support or undermine children's positive school adaptation throughout elementary school.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Obradović Jelena (Education professor) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Loeb Susanna
Stipek Deborah J.