An Exploration of Developmental Factors to Foster Emotional Suppleness in Transition to Elementary School Education

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This project explored a developmental role of "emotional suppleness" in transition to elementary school education. Eleven Child-Mother pairs who were participants in other longitudinal study from infancy were participated in this project. "Emotional suppleness" was here defined as a socio-emotional coping behavior to emotionally convert a frustrating situation into a positive fashion to denote playfulness. Therefore, it was expected that emotional suppleness would have a consequent influence of playful interactions between the mother and her child in infancy and young childhood. Then, mothers, and kindergarten and elementary school teachers of participant children were asked to fill a questionnaire on socio-emotional propensity, and the children were observed their emotionality in puzzle-solving with their good friend or parents in home. Main results were as follows: Evaluations of socio-emotional propensity in the participant children showed any significant correlations between the mothers and both school teachers. While mothers were likely to see emotionally ill-controllability as "problem", teachers regarded less discernible expressions negatively. Further, against our expectation of consequent influences of early playful interactions on positive school behaviors, the relationship was not supported. It may be why playful interactions with the mother do not offer an opportunity to have experiences as emotional switching in a conflict situation which school teachers mostly paid their attention. Those results suggested that there may be discontinuity of developmental expectations between home and school settings, and development of emotional suppleness may play an important role in adaptation to this ecological transition.