Hi Chris, the place to go for scholarly references in the social studies area, with appropriate congruency in relation to the social and emotional developmental domains, is the 2009 revised 4th edition of the NAEYC work, Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Programs Serving Children Birth to Age Eight. The NAEYC website includes a digital version of the document. I believe the social studies information there is coordinated with standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Social Studies pertaining to young children.

That book on your reading stack (hope it is near the top) includes 300 plus references to research and scholarly works. Inasmuch as each of the skills has dimensions of emotional-social development as a core, I'd say peruse the book and track down references that seem relevant to your needs. On a personal note, the research of Ladd and associates on the long term impact of peer acceptance or rejection during early childhood has influenced my writing. (Social studies in early childhood education for me starts with each child finding a place as worthy and contributing member of the group--DLS 1. As children make gains in DLS 1 and 2, they become empowered to progress toward 3, 4 and 5.)

The construct of the democratic life skills is new--not as separate ideas but in how they come together as standards (measurable goals) in the use of guidance. In the last (very brief) chapter I reiterate the fact that much research has yet to be done on the construct. For example, authentic observation scales that assess young children's progress through the skills have yet to be developed and demonstrated. In that concluding chapter, I invite you of the next generation to take on and accomplish these tasks--to the extent that the DLS have meaning for you as a guiding construct for education in the 21st Century (leading toward the 22nd).

This is a common, very big challenge, Emily, at all levels of education. Often new teachers in situations face this one--and there isn't an easy answer. I can suggest a strategy, though, which comes down to not trying to push for changes, improvements in programming, by yourself. In whatever situation, especially if a person is new, building relations with other staff is the starting point. In particular, look for other staff who see things like you do.

If possible, building these alliances with more senior staff is important. Even if there is not formal tenure in your situation, staff who are established are likely to have some clout and, frankly, are less likely to jeopardize their positions by nudging others toward new ideas. If the other, perhaps others, are senior staff, work with them and develop the relationship(s)--and support them in their taking the lead.

The newer your colleagues are, the more moderate the improvements you both (all) should probably work for. Look for improvement ideas that solve real problems that the program is facing. New ways of doing things seem less threatening under these circumstances.

One illustration of what I mean is two assistant teachers in a preschool class who persuaded a lead teacher to do active play right away in the morning, outdoors or in the active-play room. Giving the class--which included several very energetic preschoolers--a real work-out right away seemed to make the whole group more mellow for activities that followed back in the class. The most active children in particular seemed to benefit from this schedule change. (Continuing options for fairly active play back in the classroom also helped.)

Another illustration is one new and two veteran kindergarten teachers who together persuaded a principal to allow them to adopt their own positive discipline system, as an alternative to a strict "zero tolerance" policy the principal had the rest of the school following. The two veterans approached the principal about a plan the three had learned about at a conference.

With the new teacher staying in the background, the two veterans persuaded the principal that the K. children were too young for the school's policy at older grade levels. They got permission to try the new guidance-oriented plan, which became established in the kindergarten classes--and the first grade teachers eventually expressed interest in. Often going outside the program, school, or district and bringing back new ideas makes proposed changes seem less personality-driven and more professional in their origins.

Moving on, when staff are largely in agreement about ideas some families might consider overly progressive, I think it is a good idea to be proactively on the same page. A guidebook for families spelling out policies--such as on matters of guidance--that staff go over with families at the beginning of the year is important. Staff can provide focused follow-up explanation of sections of the guidebook in digital or paper newsletters, and subsequent family meetings, over the year. Remember, building relationships with families as well as the child is the best elixir for gaining parental acceptance of new ideas.

Finally, there may be situations when a teacher is not able to build alliances with other staff and feels strongly on his/her own that "there is better way." A graduate once communicated with me that she stood her ground against what she thought was a wrongful behavioral plan for a child and was asked to leave her position as a teacher. The city was not big enough for her to escape the consequences of her principled action. She decided to go back to college, eventually got a graduate degree, and became an E.C.E trainer in another location.

Another graduate, after a year in the "real world," wrote me that the first two child care centers she was hired at used practices she thought were decidedly developmentally inappropriate. She left both, and emailed me after she got a teaching job in a third center. This program consciously followed developmentally appropriate practice. She said she was so glad she stayed true to herself and kept looking. She loves her new job.

Like I said, this big problem in the field tends not to have easy answers. But there are actions individual staff can, and perhaps should, take to make things better for the children and themselves. In terms of the democratic life skills, nothing is more difficult than living skill 5. In our transactions, we (all) have to work hard every day to keep the intelligence and the ethics parts in balance. (NAEYC publications on Professional Ethics for the field provide useful information regarding the practical applications of DLS 5.) I wish you the best in your journey.

Thanks, Carolina; this is a question I'm sure many people have an interest in. Every individual human, little or big, is unique; but at the same time there are trends in behaviors shown by the groups each individual is a member of. So, we have cases of a four-year-old boy riding a two-wheel bike or independently reading Are You My Mother. And we have cases of a four-year-old girl doing amazing gymnastics on a climber or writing a letter to Santa using mostly conventional spelling.

But at the same time there is well-substantiated data that young boys as a group are significantly behind young girls as a group in such areas of development as visual and auditory acuity, eye-hand coordination, and general concentration and attending skills.

In my view it is the adult mishandling of these gender-related developmental realities in classrooms that causes acting out behavior in some young boys--and the chain of complications that result with adult decisions about how to react. (See my earlier response to Mary.) Sometimes it is just easier to let (often adult caused) "boy behavior" go, than to figure out how to intervene with minimum sidetracking of the adult's program.

My position is that it is not so much a matter of treating boys and girls equally, as treating each child as a participating member of the group and as a person of worth. On the basis of this understanding, teachers might well open up daily schedules and activity choices to accommodate both children (of whatever gender) who can sit and do concentrated eye-hand activities for long periods and children (of whatever gender) who need to be in constant big-body motion to be happy learners.
As you might guess, I am not for institutionalizing gender differences around preset gender-related expectations (even as basic as having girls and boys stand next to each other in lines). But I am for practices that teach to all an appreciation for oneself and friendly responsiveness to others, particularly in relation to girl-boy matters.

Think NAEYC would agree that the goal in early childhood settings should be to have developmentally appropriate programs for every child in the group, not just for some children. When this is the goal, actually made manifest in the daily program, stereotype "boy behavior" diminishes, and boys and girls get along naturally. (The "cootie" factor in girl-boy relations is then put off until later in childhood.) The focus should be on each individual child and not generalized preconceptions about the gender of that child. This professional priority relates directly to what the democratic life skills are about.

I think it would depend on the age group. I've worked with infants and toddlers for the past five years and they are highly emotionally expressive although they have few if any words. I am also certified in American Sign Language and have used it while working with young children in order to give them a tool to communicate. Initially, when upset, children do not sign back. However, I have also found that if they are hungry, for instance, I'll ask if they are hungry while making the sign for the word hungry. I have found this focuses their attention and helps calm them. Eventually, they learn the signs themselves and use them to communicate instead of waiting until they are extremely emotional.

Moreover, I have experienced young children becoming calm when upset if I ask and sign things like, are you angry, sad, tired etc. I have found signing quite useful not just for it's ability to enhance language and communications skills but it's ability to help relate to young children socially and emotionally.

Thanks, Barbara, for this important question. A term sometimes used in relation to people being able to identify, acknowledge, and show understanding about feelings is emotional literacy. Of course, emotional literacy is a capacity we adults work on throughout our lives. Children are just at the beginning of learning the many dimensions of this complex but most vital human skill.

Educational programming to further this capacity seems to me to require two fundamental developmentally appropriate practices. The first is the adults’ ability to create relationships with each child, based on trust and acceptance. With secure attachments built, children have the support they need to explore, learn about, and express their emotions in non-hurting ways. Without these relationships, progress toward emotional literacy cannot happen.

One of my favorite anecdotes is of a teacher who once told a very frustrated three-year-old to use her words. The three-year old wailed, "I can't find any!" The teacher immediately recognized that the child was at the next step, and helped her learn some specific words to use.

This brings us to the second critical practice, which is intentional programming to teach for emotional literacy. We are talking class meetings here, and large and small group activities, that introduce and reinforce children's nascent capacity to recognize and manage human emotions. There are curricula out there that can aid teachers in the effort. Two that are well known are the Second Step Social-Emotional Learning Program and an international program, called Personal Dolls, which originated in United States back in the 1950s.

Whether teachers use prepared curriculum programs or coordinated methods they create themselves, bringing emotional literacy experiences into the daily program is important. Activities don't have to be elaborate or overly structured, but they do need to be planned and relevant for the children.

After teachers saw children not letting others play on the playground, one teacher and an adult volunteer put on a puppet play. (Puppets are truly magical to young children and can be a great teaching device.) Two bear puppets were playing and said no to a puppet frog that asked to join them.

The other teacher stopped the play and asked the children how the frog felt. The children knew; they said, "Sad." The teacher then asked the children how the bears could help the frog feel better: "Let him play." The play resumed and the three puppets played together. The teachers then taught an important guideline for the class, teaching for emerging emotional literacy through a puppet play and discussion.

Making the recognition, identification, and (non-hurting) expression of feelings a vital part of d.a. practice is a vital step in guiding children toward all of the democratic life skills.

Thanks, Beth, for sharing your important learning experience. These "oh gees" moments give us a chance to model a central idea in guidance: We all make mistakes. We just need to learn from them. Sometimes, a big part of that learning is modeling the ability to make amends--make things right--which I bet you figured out how to do with this child. Forgiving others, and figuring out how to make things right with others, are two foundational practices in teaching for a civil society.
Sometimes when we make a mistake, the best thing to do is smile about it. Thinking of my now famous experience of trying to get a preschooler to stop saying "dammit to hell" whenever he got frustrated. In a quiet guidance talk, I explained that those words bother people at Head Start. But, it would be just fine to say "ding-dong it" when he got upset. I would then help him with whatever the problem was. The next day Joey got upset about something and exclaimed, "Ding-dong it! Dammit to hell." I had just increased his vocabulary! The assistant teacher about fell off her chair laughing, and I "helped" Joey by doing some friendly re-teaching, trying not to smile the whole time.
Professionals learn even as they teach, even--and perhaps especially--when they make mistakes. (Teachers who are technicians--teaching by the "rule book"--often, sadly, do not.) Both in your experience and in sharing it here, you were and are acting as a professional. That's how I see it anyway; thanks for sending this in.

This is a fine question, Mary. Think it is fair to think that both young girls and boys, with only months of total life experience, feel insecure when leaving life in the home each day to join a new grouping comprised of a bunch of little and big relative strangers! The issue for me is what kind of environment early childhood professionals build with young children to make this new daily place welcome for all.
Mounting research, going back at least to 2005, indicates that many boys have a harder time adjusting to these new out of home groupings than many girls. Admittedly, the data is more normative than specific for individual children, but some of the high profile results of studies are these:
•Many more young children are asked to leave preschool programs than children are "asked" to leave K-12 systems. Preschool programs often state reasons like "Your child is not a good fit with our program." Nationally, almost 5 times as many boys as girls are asked to leave preschool programs.
•In elementary and middle school, boys are significantly more likely than girls to be harshly disciplined, put into summer remedial programs, placed in special education, and retained at grade level.
•Males are now graduating from high school, college, and many graduate programs in significantly lower numbers than females. Many experts conclude that boys face an education gap now as girls did in earlier times.
My position is that, beginning in early childhood, educators need to move beyond a traditional notion of what preschool is about--socializing young children to a conception of the classroom as a predominantly orderly and sedentary domain.
Instead, in their daily programs, early childhood educators should put a premium on high physical activity levels and nurturing interpersonal relationships. They should free themselves of traditional classroom expectations that work against the natural developmental dynamics of both girls and boys--but that boys more than girls seem to suffer the overt (though not necessarily the covert) consequences of. In physically active, highly nurturing group settings outside of the home, both girls and boys stand to gain, in long-term, meaningful ways--starting with feelings of secure, solid membership in the new social group.