The Contributions of Teacher-Child Relationships to Children’s Social Competence

Aim: The qualities of teacher-child relationships play an important role in development children’s social competence. Positive teacher-child relationships (e.g., close, warm, and sensitive) has been found to be positively related to children’s social competence. On the contrary, negative teacher-child relationships (e.g., struggle and conflict) are negatively related to children’s social competence (Acar et al., 2018; Silver et al., 2005). The reason behind why the qualities of teacher-child relationships could be important for children’s social competence comes from the Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1970) that when children feel secure and supported, they develop better social skills in a given context (Pianta, 1999).

On that ground, the purpose of the current study was to examine the contributions of the qualities of teacher-child relationships to children’s social competence in a Turkish early childhood educational context.

The data were collected from 181 preschool children (M= 58.31 months) and their teachers. Teacher reported on the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS; Pianta, 2001) to obtain information on their closeness (α = 0.83) and conflict (α = 0.86) with children. Teachers also reported on children’s social competence (α = 0.91) using Social Behavior and Evaluation Scale (SCBE; LaFreniere & Dumas, 1996).  We analyzed the data using hierarchical regression analysis.

We found that after controlling for children’s age, gender and socio-economic status, teacher-child closeness (β = ,535, t = 7,42, p < .001) was positively and teacher-child conflict (β = - ,264, t = -3,55, p < .01) was negatively associated with children’s social competence.

The results obtained from the current study revealed that establishing close relationships with teachers could be supporting children’s social competence, while conflictual relationships between teachers and children could be detrimental for the social competence.

Keywords: preschool children, teacher-student relationship, social competence, Turkish children

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https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:d3645b1a-995c-3466-aefd-73ebb2b00558