Play is essential to children's growth and development. For many years, theorists have defined play as active, engaging, and interactive. Play has been identified as a way in which children communicate and learn. Such skills are important as children interact and communicate with their family members, teachers, peers, and the community at large.…

Early childhood educator's emotional socialization may contribute crucially to young children's social-emotional competence. Here, we examined the contributions of self-reported reactions to children's emotions and beliefs about emotional socialization of 90 teachers to the social-emotional competence of 334 pre-schoolers. Teacher-reported emotion…

Quality in early childhood education (ECE) is central to equitable child development and preparation for formal schooling and has been widely studied by researchers and of interest to policy makers. As the federal pre-k program, Head Start is a key ECE context to understand quality and its implications for equity. One central measure of classroom…