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Identifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children’s early years significantly impacts their academic performance and future life. It allows them to receive special support services and the required early intervention. Preschool teachers spend considerable time with their students, which allows them to observe their behaviors in different settings like classrooms and playgrounds. However, teachers need to be knowledgeable of ASD early assessment to detect them. Whereas, all well-known ASD assessment tools are designed for populations from different cultures than the Gulf Cooperation Councils' (GCC) culture. This study emphasizes the importance of preschool age, from 3 to 5, in indicating children's early signs of ASD. This paper aims to indicate the early signs of ASD in preschool children in the UAE as a model for other GCC countries.

A qualitative method consisting of interviews with preschool teachers and the ASD children’s parents was conducted to investigate the ASD early symptoms in children.

The findings of the study show that there is a direct connection between the opinions expressed by preschool teachers and the parents of children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). These results also highlight the presence of early indications of ASD among preschool-aged children in the United Arab Emirates, such as difficulties in communication, repetitive actions, delayed speech, excessive focus on tablets, trouble paying attention, hyperactivity, sleep problems, and aggressive behavior.

The outcomes suggest a strong connection between the feedback from preschool teachers and the parents of children with ASD. The study uncovers initial indications of ASD in preschool-aged children from the United Arab Emirates, such as difficulties in communication, repetitive actions, delayed speech, excessive fascination with tablets, problems with attention, hyperactivity, sleep disturbances, and aggressive behavior.

Indian education system is obligated to assure “accessibility” to the “quality” preschool education for all children. National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has emphasised this endeavor loudly and provided clear directions to bring quality in the preschool education through effective implementation strategies. En route to this, trained and motivated preschool teachers are considered as the key factor for quality assurance. Diversity of the Indian society (language, culture, socio-economic status), variety of preschool service providers, different models of preschool education system, uneven salary structure, work load, shortage of support system, huge teacher children ratio, and unregulated sector of teacher preparation are the upfront challenge for the quality of preschool teachers and teacher education. Recruitment of trained preschool teachers, assured career growth, performance-based promotions and salary structure, regulated teacher preparation programs, adherence to the other quality standards for preschool education, digital/distance mode of obtaining required qualifications, and development of strong mechanism for monitoring; supervision as well as on-site mentoring of preschool teachers are some of the major milestones set by the government in the policy. With all this, the most important aspect is to provide encouraging and respectful environment for preschool teachers to keep them happy, contented, and motivated. The teachers, who are prepared in this way contribute in the lives of young children by creating warm and welcoming environment when they enter preschool. The NEP 2020 has brought hope, possibilities, and directions in this regard.

The purpose of the study was to ascertain how preschool children consume media, which types of media content they are sensitive to and how children affect the shopping behavior of their parents. In other words, the study aimed at revealing whether distinctions occur among the selection of the media, among preferences of media products and forms, among concepts within advertising, among the attractiveness of media contents, among the types of influence by advertising products and among the means by which boys and girls have impact on their parents.

The paper is focused on the analyses of the perception of advertising messages and media consumption of children aged from two to seven years (N = 55) and their parents (N = 55) in the Czech Republic. The semi-structured interviews with the parents and children were used as the main research method. The children’s drawings focused on popular advertising were used as a supplementary method. The final findings were subjected to qualitative analyses – to thematic content analyses.

The analyzed interviews have revealed four key factors which frame and express the Czech preschool children’s reception and consumption of the media and their consumer behavior: media, media format and media content choice of preschool children; ritualization of the media consumption processes in preschool children; identification of advertising appeals within the media content in preschool children; and influence of media (and a social and cultural environment) on shopping behavior of preschool children. The findings are summarized in the table and visualized in thematic map.

The sample size is small; therefore, it is not possible to generalize the results to all preschool children.

The study provides an explanation of the perception of media messages by preschool children from a broader perspective, from the children and their parents’ point of view.

The impact of inclusion programs on children goes beyond the classroom. It reflects families’ and children’s experiences with school systems and communities. Inclusion is more than an issue of disability, a set of strategies, or a placement. It involves the need for all children to be a part of the classroom (Odom, Schwartz, & ECRII Investigators, 2002) and for their families to be a part of their educational experiences (Soodak & Erwin, 1995). The purpose of this chapter is to identify the barriers to and facilitators of inclusion in early childhood programs through listening to the voices of parents and analyzing effective inclusive practices in the literature. The chapter is organized around five themes derived from the voices of parents about their children with disabilities in preschool placements. These themes are then connected to the findings in the literature including the key characteristics of early childhood inclusion programs. The reader is encouraged to identify the barriers to and facilitators of inclusion that the parents share through their lived experiences for each theme as well as reflect on the ways in which schools can include and collaborate with parents to foster a partnership that supports all children.

Applying sociological and developmental theoretical perspectives to educational policy issues, this study analyzed data from 7,710 children from low-income families in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. The goal was to examine how much the association between phonics instruction in kindergarten classrooms and children’s reading achievement during the first year of school in the low-income population would depend on whether children had previously attended preschool as well as the socioeconomic composition of their elementary schools. Lagged linear models with a series of sensitivity tests revealed that this association was strongest among children from low-income families who had not attended preschool and then enrolled in socioeconomically disadvantaged elementary schools and among children from low-income families who had attended preschool and then enrolled in socioeconomically advantaged elementary schools. These findings demonstrate how insights into educational inequality can be gained by situating developing children within their proximate ecologies and institutional settings, especially looking to the match between children and their contexts. They are especially relevant to timely policy discussions of early childhood education programs, classroom instructional practices, and school desegregation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the resilience of preschool teachers, aspects of teachers’ readiness to develop children's resilience and the relationship between the two constructs of resilience and readiness.

Two instruments (the “Resilience Scale For Adults” and the “Questionnaire on the Readiness of Preschool Teachers for Developing Children's Resilience”) were used to collect data on resilience and readiness for developing children's resilience from 191 female preschool teachers enrolled in a graduate education programme in the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Data were analysed by factor analyses and a two-way analyses of variance.

Results indicate that preschool teachers achieve high results on resilience measures, and that they have supportive attitudes towards programmes for building children's resilience and are willing to implement such programmes in their everyday practice. Those preschool teachers who perceived themselves as more resilient also considered that they were more competent in developing resilience in children. Additionally, preschool teachers who perceived their kindergarten's institutional climate as supportive, felt that they are more competent for fostering resilience in children, and were at the same time more willing to implement programmes for building children's resilience.

The findings suggest that the level of institutional supportiveness is related to preschool teachers’ competence and willingness to foster resilience in children. Those preschool teachers who perceive their institutional climate as supportive feel more willing and competent to implement programmes for developing children's resilience. Additionally, teachers’ competence for developing resilience in children is related to their own resilience: more resilient preschool teachers feel more competent to foster children's resilience. These results suggest that general institutional climate and resilience of those adults who work with preschool children are important aspects of early educational environment, and should be taken into consideration when planning the implementation of programmes for building children's resilience.

This research is the first Croatian research on resilience in the context of early childhood education. It also represents a contribution to a relatively small number of studies that link preschool teachers’ resilience with their readiness to foster resilience in children.

This paper aims to fill the gap in social sciences research on parents’ strategies in navigating preschool education in Russia. It focusses on the barriers that children with developmental disabilities and autism face in preschool education in Russia and highlights the emerging facilitators of inclusive education.

It uses a modified labelling approach analysing strategies of withdrawal and resistance. The research included semi-structured interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, Rett syndrome and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in 2013–2014 and 2018–2019 and semi-structured interviews with professionals in Tatarstan, Russia. The data analysis was based on constructivist methods and grounded theory.

Although Russian law guarantees equal access to education for every child and requires the development of inclusive education, children with developmental disabilities, including autism, are often stigmatised at the preschool stage, both in special needs and mainstream institutions. Parents use various strategies to navigate access to preschool education and try more than one strategy from secrecy and withdrawal to resistance. Parents challenged the mainstream educational structures in Kazan and established groups for children with autism in some mainstream kindergartens and classes in mainstream schools.

There should be informational support for parents with different options for special needs education, providing integrative and inclusive education. It is necessary to increase the number of trained specialists in special needs and mainstream kindergartens in Russia for children with developmental disabilities and ASD. More study is required to overcome stigmatisation and increase tolerance towards persons with developmental disabilities in Russia both on a national and local level.

The research findings can be useful for countries which have recently recognised ASD and do not have inclusive preschool educational practices and where labelling towards children with developmental disabilities is still common. The study recommends that resources are required to provide free or affordable preschool education for children with developmental disabilities. It is also crucial to help parents navigate preschool education and select the best options for each child’s needs.

This study’s findings add value to the importance of addressing the stigma towards people with disabilities within professional groups and broader society, which form barriers for preschool education and in some cases result in withdrawal from preschool education. To overcome the stigmatisation of children with developmental disabilities in preschool education, it is necessary to establish modern targeted pedagogical approaches and training for professionals and informational campaigns for the broader audience.

The paper is novel as there was no sociological research into preschool education of children with developmental disabilities in Russia. It argues that the parents’ experiences are much broader than just interactions with special needs or mainstream education. Parents navigate across special needs institutions, specialised groups in mainstream and private kindergartens, mixed groups in mainstream kindergartens and home education with various strategies from secrecy and withdrawal to resistance and challenge. Preschool education for children with developmental disabilities in Russia is hindered by a lack of professional resources and the stigma embedded into professional and societal responses.

This study aims to examine the interplay between culturally relevant materials, child racial ethnic classroom composition and positive emotional climate in regard to high levels of peer play in low-income, urban preschools located in African-American and Mexican immigrant/Mexican-American communities in the USA.

The sample includes state or city subsidized child care programs in the USA which were traditionally African-American programs that experienced an influx of Latino immigrant enrollment. Instruments included structured observations of classroom peer play and cultural artifacts. Hierarchical multiple regression was run to determine whether cultural artifacts and child ethnic composition within classrooms contributed to the prediction of high-peer play over positive emotional climate alone.

The final model indicates that cultural artifacts reflective of African-American culture positively predict high levels of peer play, while Mexican-American cultural items are negatively predictive. In classrooms with a majority African-American population, predicted high-peer play is 7.994 greater than that predicted for majority of Latino classrooms.

Positive emotional climate in these programs was not very high, and it is not clear whether the findings discussed in this report would hold in contexts that exhibit much higher levels of positive emotional climate. It is also not clear that the inclusion of cultural artifacts in contexts in which African-American children are the minority or in racial-ethnically heterogeneous classrooms would lead to the same findings.

ECE classroom should make specific choices as to what culturally relevant materials to include in early childhood classrooms. Teachers of young children of color must facilitate children’s engagement with these materials by ensuring that they are representative of the children’s cultural experiences and by supporting children’s engagement with peers through the formation of emotionally positive classroom climates.

This study points to interesting relationships between what teachers have in classrooms and children’s engagement with each other within those contexts. The findings from this study also exemplify that a one-size-fits-all approach toward childhood development may be counterproductive. Children bring with them ethnic and cultural heritages, which when combined with the preschool culture, create unique experiences for them that should not be ignored or controlled for analysis, but rather, understood.

This study provides a unique analysis of seldom considered contexts by examining the use of culturally relevant materials in urban, early childhood contexts. Teachers of young children have been found to consider a focus on race and ethnicity as unnecessary or to engage in a colorblind approach with young children. This study demonstrates how paying careful consideration to the cultural environment in classrooms also supports children’s exploration and play quality.

In this chapter, I focus on two methodological issues involved with conducting ethnographies of very young children; establishing a researcher role in preschool classrooms while simultaneously gaining access into children’s culture and the trust of adult gatekeepers involved (i.e., teachers). Drawing on my participant observation experiences in 10 preschool classrooms (over 470 hours and 19 months of observations), I challenge the use of the friend role (Fine & Sandstrom, 1988) and least-adult role (Mandell, 1988) in research with young children. I examine how teachers mediate the researcher’s role in participant observation of children in preschool classrooms demonstrating the importance of establishing a middle manager role between teachers and children when conducting participant observations. I also discuss strategies used to overcome adult’s mediation of the researcher’s role, and strategies for simultaneously gaining teachers and children’s rapport in participant observation research in ways that formulate positive relationships with adults and children. I demonstrate the importance of researcher reflexivity of children’s and adults’ assessments of researchers’ roles in the field, highlighting how researchers’ impacts on children are not dependent on the times they are present in the field. Instead, I show that children continue to critically assess researchers’ positionality and roles in the field, often times seeking the help of adults (i.e., parents and teachers), further stressing the need for researchers to negotiate an understanding of their roles with both adults and children prior to and while in the field.

This paper studies earnings and labor force participation of native Swedes and recent immigrants in Sweden in response to the childcare reforms of 2001 and 2002 using a difference-in-differences approach and register-based data for the period of 1995–2009. Immigrant and native Swedish mothers are distinguished in order to study if increased accessibility to childcare might be particularly beneficial for groups facing obstacles in entering the labor market. The results show that the reforms had a positive effect on earnings and labor force participation among native mothers with preschool children. The group of immigrant mothers studied did not experience any gain in labor market outcomes as a response to the reform.