Funding outcome

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wide reaching risk for children's early development, with adverse effects that are expected to persist and be pervasive. This may be particularly true for children aged 3 to 4 years who have experienced the pandemic for the majority of their lives. Indeed, early childhood is a sensitive developmental period for children's emerging social-emotional skills and abilities to manage emotional negativity and distress. Reports indicate that child social-emotional problems have increased over the 2 years of the pandemic and continue to be among the leading health, social and educational concerns facing Canadian children. Elevated social-emotional problems may be particularly likely to occur across transitions that can be stressful for young children, such as the transitions into preschool and kindergarten. The spillover effects of the pandemic may exaggerate the stress of this first transition into a classroom context for children aged 3 to 4, particularly for the most socially, emotionally and cognitively vulnerable children. More developmentally and emotionally supportive and responsive classroom interactions may confer a source of protection for the social-emotional well-being of vulnerable young children. However, little is known about how vulnerable children's experiences in early classrooms exaggerate or attenuate risks for social-emotional problems and abilty to manage emotional distress. To address this knowledge gap, this research will examine how the quality of interactions in preschool classrooms: (1) relate to children's social-emotional well-being and coping strategies across the early school years; (2) buffer individual child risks, such as difficulties regulating emotional distress, on their social-emotional well-being and problems, and (3) matter for both girls and boys, neurodiverse and neurotypical children, and children from diverse family backgrounds.