Browsing by Subject "early childhood"

A child's emotional self-regulation skills affects clearly on how he/she behaves, reacts and builds his/hers understanding in different kinds of everyday activities. This research focuses on examining how children's emotional self-regulation skills occur in the everyday activities in Finnish day care and how it will effect on the children's social strategies. There were two research problems: (1) How a child's emotional self-regulation skills occur in the everyday activities in day care? And (2) How emotional self-regulation skills occur in children's social strategies? The theoretical relation of the emotional self-regulation skills and day care's every-day activities were supported by several self-regulation related international researches and theories. Child's Social Strategies were operated through Reunamo's (2007) different views of the relationships between perception and environmental change -theory. The method of this research was quantitative. The data used in this study was a part of Reunamo's (2010) Orientation project which included evaluation of the children's skills (n = 862), child observations (n = 18 364) and interviews (n = 805). 892 different children of the 47 different day cares and 17 child minders participated in the project. The instrument of the child's emotional self-regulation skills was based on teacher's likert scale evaluation of how a child recognizes his/her own feelings and how he/she can deal with them. The data was analyzed by using t-test, correlation, cross tabulation and chi-square. The results of the research brought out that children who had good emotional self-regulation skills had more often a social target on themselves than other children. Good self-regulation skills improved their ability to recognize other children's feelings and affected how they adapted to new situations with others, and to participate eagerly and with initiative to different activities. The poor skills of emotional self-regulation appeared in the child's tendency to use his/her influence and willpower towards other children. They were also strolling everywhere, seeking and waiting more often than other children. The children with poor emotional self-regulation skills didn't get involved in the day care activities as often. Nor did they use their imaginations to role play as other children did. Their social strategies were more often uncertain in social situations and they did not know how to react on them.