Fostering toddlers’ social emotional competence: considerations of teachers’ emotion language by child gender

The current study examines teachers’ differential emotion socialization practices with girls and boys by observing the emotion language of 27 teachers in naturally-occurring classroom interactions with 112 toddlers. This study explores the valence of teachers’ emotion language, the type of teachers’ emotion language, and the relation between teachers’ emotion language and toddlers’ social emotional competence, all by child gender. Results indicate that teachers use negative emotion language more than they use positive emotion language with boys, and emotion language differed by the type of language (labelling, questioning, explaining, or minimizing) for both genders. Additionally, teachers’ minimizing of negative emotions to boys was negatively associated with toddler boys’ social emotional competence. The current study offers implications for the ways in which we view, socialize, and measure social emotional competence by child gender.