Browsing by Author "Vähätalo, Niina"

Objectives. The ability to show compassion has developed in humans to strengthen social relationships and to enable social functions. Compassion is conceived as a state of concern for others suffering and as a desire to alleviate it. Previous studies have determined that compassion in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) is constructed culturally and that it is dependent on the actions of the adults. This study describes how children react when they confront a crying child in the ECEC setting and explores how children take part in showing compassion to crying children. Methods. The research data was 50 hours of video footage. There was identified 27 episodes where children were crying. The children participating in the study were aged between 1-4 years old. Firstly theory-based content analysis was applied in the data and then the categories that were formed were analysed by multimodal interaction analysis. Conclusions. This study highlights the previous studies in which it was defined that compassionate acts in the ECEC are most often performed by the adults. It was determined that the children mostly continued their previous actions or gazed at the compassionate acts that were performed when other children were crying. The children could also refuse to show compassion to the crying child. The compassionate acts that the children performed were made with the support of the adults, together with the adults or independently. In this study compassion was always shown to the crying child. It should be established how to increase children’s compassion in the ECEC and how to utilize the adult’s role in it.