| الملخص: | Children’s emotional experiences during early childhood education and care (ECEC) are important for children’s emotional development and the socialization of this development by teachers. One central goal of emotion socialization is that it should help children acquire reflective regulation of their emotions, resulting in socially acceptable and age-appropriate experience and behavior. The current study is based on emotionally challenging situations of children in ECEC and aims at investigating, first, associations of teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation with children’s self-regulation, and, second, how teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation are linked with characteristics of the specific emotion episode and the involved child. Based on extensive video observations in the preschool setting (N = 19 groups), this study analyzed episodes with teacher interventions (N = 48 teachers) following a negative emotion expression by one or two children (N = 213 children aged 2–6 years old). Multilevel results show, first, that teachers’ initial emotion coaching and co-regulation through meta-cognitive prompts were associated with children’s independent self-regulation. Second, teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation were systematically associated with characteristics of the emotion episode, especially emotion quality and intensity. The findings support the assumption that emotion coaching and co-regulation are especially valuable tools to support self-regulation. However, emotion coaching and the different co-regulation levels and strategies do not turn out to be universal strategies that are used indiscriminately, but teachers use them depending on individual child and situational characteristics. Impact Statement: Teachers in ECEC play a significant role in supporting children’s self-regulation of emotions. Results of the current study suggest that especially emotion coaching (i.e., mirroring children’s expression of negative affect, labeling their feelings, and validating their situational appropriateness) and meta-cognitive co-regulation (e.g., asking children for ideas to regulate one’s emotion) promote children’s self-regulation of negative emotions. Furthermore, these specific practices - as probably also their successful application – are associated with situational characteristics such as emotion quality and intensity, as well as the child’s age. These findings provide implications for the practice of early childhood teachers, which can be addressed in education and training programs.
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