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Emotional competence supports preschoolers’ social relationships and school success. Parents’ emotions and reactions to preschoolers’ emotions can help them become emotionally competent, but scant research corroborates this role for preschool teachers. Expected outcomes included: teachers’ emotion socialization behaviors functioning most often like parents’ in contributing to emotional competence, with potential moderation by socioeconomic risk. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

Participants included 80 teachers and 312 preschoolers experiencing either little economic difficulty or socioeconomic risk. Children’s emotionally negative/dysregulated, emotionally regulated/productive and emotionally positive/prosocial behaviors were observed, and their emotion knowledge was assessed in Fall and Spring. Teachers’ emotions and supportive, nonsupportive and positively emotionally responsive reactions to children’s emotions were observed during Winter. Hierarchical linear models used teacher emotions or teacher reactions, risk and their interactions as predictors, controlling for child age, gender and premeasures.

Some results resembled those parents’: positive emotional environments supported children’s emotion knowledge; lack of nonsupportive reactions facilitated positivity/prosociality. Others were unique to preschool classroom environments (e.g. teachers’ anger contributed to children’s emotion regulation/productive involvement; nonsupportiveness predicted less emotional negativity/dysregulation). Finally, several were specific to children experiencing socioeconomic risk: supportive and nonsupportive reactions, as well as tender emotions, had unique, but culturally/contextually explainable, meanings in their classrooms.

Applications to teacher professional development, and both limitations and suggestions for future research are considered.

This study is among the first to examine how teachers contribute to the development of preschoolers’ emotional competence, a crucial set of skills for life success.

Overheating is considered a modifiable risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The purpose of this paper is to explore differences in infant thermal care beliefs between mothers of South Asian and white British origin in Bradford, UK.

This study employed face-to-face interviews with semi-structured and structured questions with 51 white British and 51 South-Asian mothers in the Bradford District, UK.

White British mothers were more concerned about overheating causing SIDS whereas South-Asian mothers were more concerned about cold causing respiratory infections. However concerns around hypothermia and chills causing colds were expressed in both groups. White British mothers were significantly more likely to be concerned about their infant getting too hot than too cold and South-Asian mothers about both heat and cold (p0.001), but white British mothers on lower incomes and with poorer education expressed concern about cold more so than their better off, better educated peers indicating a possible link to fuel poverty.

It was not possible to observe actual night-time practices and that South Asian as a cultural category is limited because could be regarded as too broad.

Whilst there guidance available to prevent infants overheating to prevent SIDS there is little or none about infants getting cold and how temperature affects other conditions.

Thermal care behaviours and beliefs differ between ethnic groups. SIDS and overheating is only one concern for mothers in providing thermal care for their infants. More policy and research is needed to explore the wider impact of thermal care on infant health and survival.

This topic is rarely addressed despite the wide ranging implications of heat and cold to infant well-being.