Preparing emotionally competent early educators

A child’s impressionable brain achieves 90% of its development in the years from birth to age 5 (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). So, if we want young children to be prepared to succeed in K-12 learning, then we ought to ensure that early childhood educators know how to take advantage of this developmental window. This starts with building their capacity to understand children’s emotions.

In the October 2021 Kappan, Josh Thompson and Zlata Stanković-Ramirez describe how the National Association for the Education of Young Children, through its standards for developmentally appropriate practice, calls on teachers to get to know the individual children in their care and build nurturing relationships with them in ways that respond to their specific cultural contexts. However, as Shantel Meek explains in her interview, the quality of childcare programs in the U.S. is wildly uneven (Heller, 2021). Further, a lack of well-trained early educators has been a long-standing problem in the field (Preston, 2021).

So, in addition to expanding access to childcare and ensuring that it is developmentally appropriate and equitable, as the October Kappan authors propose, we must also provide high-quality, effective professional development and training opportunities for early childhood teachers (Lipscomb et al., 2021). In particular, teachers must learn to recognize and manage their own emotions, stress, and anxieties so they can better model emotional competence, self-regulation, and empathy for their students. When they master these skills and are trained to successfully teach them to children in their care, we see children who are more confident and empathetic; better able to deal effectively with and manage their emotions and behavior; and more academically, socially, and personally successful (Housman, Denham, & Cabral, 2018). Emotional competence is a foundation for lifelong learning and success, but it starts in the early years, and it starts with our teachers.