Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

with friends fared be t ter than those wholost their friends at that time. Dunn (1993)found that children whose friends changedd ayca re settings with them re m e m be re dt h at it was the pre s e n ce of those fri e n d st h at made them feel happy there.In addition, Dunn looked at the possiblelinks between children’s attachments withfamily members – principally theirmothers – and those with their friends.She found, surprisingly, that there was noevidence of an association betweenchildren’s expressions of emotion withtheir mothers (either positive or negative)and their interactions with their friends.However, she also found that children fromfamilies where there were frequent familyarguments and outbursts of anger wereunable to reason with their friends whendisputes arose. Most importantly, childrenwho enjoyed high levels of involvementwith their mothers were more likely tocompromise and be conciliatory withfriends, to enter elaborate shared fantasyplay bouts and conversations.One could surmise that the early closerelationships and the mothers’ modellinghelped these children learn how to get onwith other children, to solve disputeswithout being unreasonable, and thatsimilar interactions with and modelling bya practitioner can have the same effect.In fact, although her detailed qualitativeresearch was with children in two preschoolgroups, Sally Lubeck (1986) foundthat children in a setting where the threemembers of a staff team modelledpositive, supportive, cooperative behaviourwith each other the children showed moreof these behaviours than in a settingwhere staff did not behave in this way.The findings from re s e a rch ex a m i n i n gc h i l d re n’s adjustment to ECEC settings aremixed. Deater-Deckard et al (1996) claimthat children’s behavioural adjustment ism o re closely linked to home env i ro n m e ntfactors than the quality rating awardedtheir day care setting. However, whenHowes et al (1994) explored the waysin which a child’s re l ationship witha pra ctitioner affe cted their re l at i o n s h i pwith their pe e r s, t h ey found that yo u n gchildren who felt secure with theireducarer displayed complex play withpeers and were gregarious. Those whowere dependent on the adult were,however, withdrawn from their peersand hostile and aggressive towardsthem. Where practitioners encouragedand modelled soc i a l i s at i o n ,the childre nseemed to demonstrate greateracceptance of each other. The sameresearch team (Howes et al 1994a)had also found that children’s socialcompetence with peers and theirrelationship with their educator at fouryears of age, were both related to theirrelationship with their first educarer.In Sweden Broberg et al (1997) found thatthe children’s cognitive abilities at ageeight could have been predicted from thequality of the out-of-home care (in centresor with childminders) they attended.Theirresearch involved 87 children agedbetween 16 and 19 months at the start ofthe project, whom they tracked through at61