1. General Background
Early childhood relationships with significant caregivers affect a variety of
developmental domains, such as the social, emotional, and cognitive domains
(Sroufe et al., 2009). The research domain literature has mainly focused on
mother-child interaction as a factor influencing child development, but in recent
years the understanding has grown that great importance lies in significant
caregiver figures such as the kindergarten teacher.
The emotional ties between the kindergarten teacher and the child may have a
long-term effect and thus, for example, ties characterized by high levels of
closeness and low levels of conflict, contribute to the child’s socio-emotional,
behavioral and academic adjustment, while negative, low closeness, or conflict
may affect outcomes and may damage the child academics, motivation and
behavior (Bosman et al., 2018).
Although emotional discourse is an important strategy that teachers and
kindergarteners can use to help their students, this topic has not yet been
sufficiently explored (Spilt et al., 2021).
2. Review of Literature
2.1 Emotional discourse
For healthy social-emotional development the child needs to build meaning for
emotional experiences to increase his understanding of his inner world. One way to
promote such understanding is through connecting children to conversations about
emotional experiences (Spilt et al., 2021). Studies in this context have mainly
examined the dialogue between parents and children, with these dialogues providing
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an opportunity to observe how they jointly construct narratives about the child’s
emotional experiences, including how emotions are received, which emotions should
be emphasized or even overemphasized, and which emotions should not be
discussed at all. (Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2021).
A child who is encouraged to explore his or her emotions through dialogue with the
caregiver feels confident in expressing a variety of emotions and recalling emotionally
challenging events because he or she understands that they can trust the caregiver to
help him or her manage his or her emotions and how to appropriate cope next time.
When an emotional dialogue takes place between a teacher and a child, the adult
connects to the child through a process of building meaningful emotional experiences.
This process makes the child more sensitive to his or her internal emotional states,
raises his or her awareness of the causes and consequences, and helps him or her to
explore appropriate expressions of emotions (Spilt et al., 2021).