Abstract
Children’s socio-emotional development during the preschool years is an important predictor of positive academic, social, and mental health outcomes across the life span. Socio-emotional development can be fostered through oral language interactions with the important adults in young children’s lives. In particular, reminiscing—or shared conversations about the past—are one way that adults can promote children’s socio-emotional learning. In the present thesis I present three studies to address some unanswered questions about adult-child reminiscing.
Emotion-rich parent-child reminiscing has been associated with benefits for children’s socio-emotional development. To date, the reminiscing literature has focused primarily on the interactions between mothers and children, yet there are other important adults in children’s lives who might also be reminiscing with them. In our first study, we explored how educators within home-based early childhood education and care settings are reminiscing with their preschool aged children. We found that educators, like parents, used a predominantly elaborative reminiscing style—giving rich detail about past shared events. Children varied in how much they contributed in these shared conversations. Importantly, children’s use of evaluative language (e.g., special, favourite, best) was associated positively with children’s socio-emotional outcomes.
In our second study, we evaluated the benefits of a professional development module for home-based educators promoting Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) for educator-child reminiscing and children’s developing socio-emotional competencies. Benefits were evaluated in two ways: (1) Between-group post-test comparisons of educator-child reminiscing interactions and socio-emotional outcomes of children who participated in RRR with their educators to those who participated in another professional development module (Enhancing Neuro-behavioural Gains with the Aid of Games and Exercise; ENGAGE), specifically targeting aspects of children’s socio-emotional development (e.g., self-regulation), and (2) by following educators and children who participated in RRR and conducting within-case comparisons of educator-child interactions and children’s socio- emotional development over time. We found that RRR had potential benefits for educators’ use of cognitive language, children’s use of elaborations, and children’s performance on some socio-emotional tasks. Notably, children who became more elaborative in reminiscing conversations over time improved their performance on a measure of self-regulation.
In our third study, we assessed parent-child reminiscing and school-aged children’s socio-emotional competencies one year after the children (then pre-school-aged) had participated in RRR. Although we did not detect between-group differences in the frequencies of children’s reminiscing variables during recorded conversations about a positive event after one year, we did find benefits for parents’ use of evaluative language. Moreover, children who had experienced RRR were also rated by their teachers as being better at using language to communicate, and better at participating and contributing in the classroom. These findings highlight that some benefits of RRR may be present one year after implementation.
Together, our findings provide further evidence that rich and elaborative reminiscing is associated with children’s important socio-emotional outcomes. This thesis adds to the reminiscing literature by describing how educators may be talking with children about past events and highlighting how professional development modules focusing on reminiscing education can support children’s socio-emotional development.