California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
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ment”—has emerged. It emphasizes
that in addition to responding to the
incentives and punishments of adults,
young children are motivated to cooperate
by their emotional attachments
to those adults and their desire to
maintain positive relationships with
them. Children cooperate in order to
maintain relationships of mutual cooperation
with the adults who care for
them. Furthermore, young children are
also motivated by the feelings of others
to act in ways that do not cause others
distress. Moreover, as they reach the
end of the preschool years, children
are also motivated to cooperate and act
responsibly because in doing so, they
think more approvingly of themselves.
This reflects that young children have
proceeded from a primarily “external”
view of adults’ expectations and standards—in
other words, cooperating
because this is what adults expect—to
an “internalized” acceptance of adult
standards as their goal. The desire to
perceive themselves as cooperative,
helpful, and “good” emerges at this
time and will remain an important,
lifelong motivator of moral conduct.
These conclusions about the development
of cooperation and responsibility
emerge from a large body of
research literature, to which Kochanska
has made major contributions
(e.g., see Kochanska 1997, 2002;
Kochanska and Thompson 1997). A
review of this research literature can
be found in Thompson, Meyer, and
McGinley (2006). The development of
capacities for cooperation and responsibility
is important to early school
success. A number of research teams
have found that individual differences
in children’s cooperation capacities
are directly associated with children’s
academic achievement in the early
primary grades (Alexander, Entwisle,
and Dauber 1993; McClelland, Morrison,
and Holmes 2000; Yen, Konold,
and McDermott 2004). Children who
show greater cooperative compliance
with their teachers are capable of getting
along better in the classroom and
achieve more than do children who are
less cooperative.
During the past several decades,
however, a new view of the early
growth of cooperation and
responsibility—studied under the term
“conscience development”—
has emerged.
Developmental changes in children’s
motivated cooperation and their growing
sense of responsibility build on
developmental accomplishments in
other social and emotional areas. In
particular, these changes build on
children’s developing capacities for
self-regulation and changes in selfawareness
that enable older preschoolers
to perceive themselves as positive
and approvable. In this respect, as in
others, growth in the later preschool
period is integrated and consistent
across different areas of development.
Relationships
Attachments to Parents
One of the central conclusions of
developmental research is the extent
to which young children rely on their
close relationships with caregivers for
emotional security and well-being.
Decades of research on parent-child
attachment relationships in infancy
and early childhood have established
the importance of the security of these
relationships and their long-term
Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1 • California Department of Education