Chapter 15
Establishing the Foundations
Prosocial Education in Early Childhood Development
Ross A. Thompson, Janet E. Thompson, and Abby C. Winer
It has been a rich, full day at preschool, and now it is time to clean up and get ready for closing activities. The teacher, Kiyomi Nomura, began singing the cleanup song, and soon the children were engaged in stacking blocks in the shelves, returning dress-up materials to their bins, and putting away books and art projects—all the children, that is, except for five-year-old Kyle. When Ms. Nomura asked Kyle why he was not participating in cleanup, his reply was immediate: “I didn’t make this mess.” Which was true: Kyle had spent most of his time in the reading corner. But Ms. Nomura replied, “Kyle, this is our classroom, and we are all responsible for it.” It was a theme that Kyle had heard before in circle time: we share responsibility for our space and for each other. In a moment, Kyle joined the other children to make the classroom orderly again.
Encounters like these are a familiar feature of early childhood education, and they reflect a change that has occurred in our understanding of young children. Character development and prosocial education begin in early childhood and build on young children’s developing sensitivity to others’ feelings and needs, their natural interest in creating cooperative relationships with children and adults, and their desire to perceive themselves in positive ways. A thoughtfully designed early education curriculum can build on these psychological resources to promote prosocial motivation in young children.
Such a view may be unfamiliar to those steeped in the thinking of Piaget (1932/1965) and Kohlberg (1969) about moral development in young children, especially the view that young children are primarily egocentric, preconventional thinkers. Indeed, the focus on older children found in most character education curricula (and efforts to promote social-emotional learning in general) derives in part from the view that preschoolers are too self-focused and psychologically immature to benefit from interventions of this kind. This belief contrasts with the conclusion of developmental science in recent years that young children develop an early and surprisingly astute awareness of others’ emotional and mental states to which they can respond with understanding and cooperation. Preschoolers may be hindered by their limited social understanding, cognitive flexibility, and self-regulatory capacities, but not by egocentrism. When this knowledge is combined with the increasingly normative experience of group care and education for young children in the United States, it suggests that character education can begin at substantially earlier ages than conventionally believed. Prosocial education in middle childhood and adolescence builds on the foundations established in early childhood.
This chapter is concerned with prosocial education in early childhood. Our goal is to describe the conclusions of research that have led to a new appreciation of the social and emotional sensitivity of young children, and the implications of this research for prosocial motivation. We then profile several promising curricular approaches to prosocial education, although work in this area is still in the early stages. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the implications of this work for policy and practice in the field of prosocial education, and for the promotion of social and emotional competence in young children more generally.
Early Developing Social, Emotional, and Prosocial Responding
Developmental scientists have long observed young children acting prosocially and helpfully toward others (for reviews, see Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006; Hay, 1994; Rheingold & Hay, 1978). But in an earlier scientific era focused on the social-cognitive limitations of young children, such observations were conventionally attributed to the rewards accompanying cooperative conduct, young children’s imitative behavior, or the influence of parental instruction. With more recent understanding of how early young children derive knowledge of others’ emotions, goals, and thoughts, these observations of early prosocial motivation have assumed greater significance as a foundation of concern for others.
Consider recent research by Warneken and Tomasello (2006, 2007). In a series of carefully designed laboratory tasks, they showed that eighteen-month-olds would help an unfamiliar experimenter when the adult’s need for assistance was clear and toddlers knew how to provide help. They opened the doors of a cabinet, for example, when the adult tried unsuccessfully to open them to put in a stack of books filling his arms. They retrieved a marker that the adult accidentally dropped on the floor. By contrast, toddlers rarely helped when the adult’s need for aid was not apparent in the adult’s behavior (e.g., when a marker was not accidentally dropped but intentionally tossed to the floor). These young children were discriminating in their behavior toward an unfamiliar adult based on explicit cues of need, and they provided help independently of maternal support and in the absence of formal or informal rewards for doing so. Indeed, a follow-up study showed that extrinsic rewards undermined the helping of twenty-month-olds (Warneken & Tomasello, 2008).
These findings have been replicated by others (e.g., Svetlova, Nichols, & Brownell, 2010), including our own lab group (Newton, Goodman, Rogers, Burris, & Thompson, 2010). In our research, individual differences in toddlers’ helping were predicted in some conditions by children’s emotion-state language, a measure of expressive language that is often used as a proxy for emotional understanding in very young children. This is consistent with the influence of emotion in prosocial motivation in older children and adults, because many prosocial acts involve responding to the feelings of others in sympathetic or compassionate ways (Eisenberg et al., 2006).
The Warneken and Tomasello findings are important because they are part of a research program that demonstrates young children’s capacities for shared intentionality with another person (see Tomasello, 2007; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Shared intentionality refers to an individual’s capacity to discern, participate in, and advance another’s goal-directed behavior. It is one of the earliest examples of a young child’s capacity to understand another’s mental states. Toddlers’ discriminative helping in circumstances in which the adult needed assistance reflects, according to this research group, toddlers’ awareness of the intended goals of the adult and their willingness to contribute to achieving those goals. This conclusion is consistent with other research findings with very young children. In studies of joint attention, pointing, language acquisition, collaborative problem solving, imitation, and other behaviors, young children demonstrate their sensitivity to the goals and intentions underlying others’ behavior as they seek to alter those intentions on some occasions to achieve their purposes (such as reaching while drawing mother’s attention to a desired treat) or, on other occasions, sharing the intentional states of others in helpful and cooperative acts (see Meltzoff, 2007; Tomasello & Herrmann, 2010; Tomasello et al., 2005).
These early capacities to discern and share another’s intentional states are in marked contrast to the assumption that young children are self-focused and cognitively limited. Indeed, even when another’s goals and desires are very different from the child’s own, toddlers will respond appropriately to the intentions of the other person. In one study, for example, eighteen-month-olds watched as an adult experimenter showed food preferences that were very different from the child’s own while sampling from bowls of broccoli (with expressions of animated pleasure) and goldfish crackers (to which the adult expressed disgust) (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). When the adult subsequently extended her hand and said, “I want some more. Can you give me more?” the toddlers reliably gave the adult more broccoli, even though the children themselves preferred goldfish crackers. The capacity of children of this age to associate positive and negative emotional expressions with preferences and desires is a foundation for the subsequent development of other forms of mental understanding. Their ability to respond appropriately to the adult’s preferences—even when they conflict with the child’s own—reflects a developing capacity for shared intentionality.
Early Sensitivity to Emotions, Intentions, and Goals
Arguments for an early capacity for shared intentionality assume that young children do, indeed, derive inferences concerning others’ intentions and goals from observing their behavior. There is considerable experimental research indicating that this occurs beginning in infancy and is based, in part, on infants’ considerable experience with goal-directed activity of their own (Meltzoff, 2007; Woodward, 2009). Experiencing firsthand their own intentional efforts appears to cause infants to interpret others’ behavior in terms of goals and intentions as well. By the second year, toddlers will imitate an adult’s intended action, even if the adult was unable to complete that action successfully in the child’s presence. After watching an adult trying to use a stick to push a button that activated a buzzer but consistently failing to do so (i.e., missing the button), nearly all eighteen-month-olds subsequently used the stick to push the button (Meltzoff, 1995).
Emotional expressions are important to early inferences of another’s goals and intentions because the accomplishment of goals is often accompanied by positive emotions, and emotions like sadness, anger, surprise, and confusion are associated with the frustration of intentional activity. During the first year, infants become capable of differentiating the meaning of positive and negative emotional expressions in the face and voice and responding appropriately to the emotions they perceive (for a review, see Thompson, 2006). Thus early developing understanding of emotional expressions becomes an avenue for inferring others’ desires and goals because of the emotions associated with goal achievement. One-year-olds are likely to gesture to the location of an object, for example, after they have observed a perplexed experimenter looking for the misplaced object (Liszkowski, Carpenter, Striano, & Tomasello, 2006).
As observed in the eighteen-month-olds studied by Repacholi and Gopnik (1997), therefore, toddlers are well on their way to understanding the associations between observed emotions; the desires, intentions, and goals they reveal; and the actions that contribute to satisfying those desires and accomplishing those goals. With respect to prosocial behavior, they are capable of perceiving another’s emotional expressions and making simple inferences concerning why the other person might be feeling that way and, when relevant, acting helpfully, even when doing so requires comprehending intentions and preferences that are different from the child’s own. In this respect, therefore, many of the conceptual bases for prosocial behavior are well established in early childhood.
Varieties of Prosocial Conduct
Prosocial behavior is not one thing, of course. Instead, there are different forms of prosocial conduct, and they involve different social and emotional requirements for young children. As earlier noted, Svetlova and colleagues (2010) showed that children as young as eighteen months can instrumentally help an adult. They also showed that young children’s capacities for prosocial conduct increase significantly during the next year, with greater social and emotional understanding. Empathic responding was more difficult for eighteen-month-olds in their study, for example, and required more explicit cues from the adult experimenter about her needs, whereas altruistic responding (i.e., giving up an object of the child’s own to assist the adult) was challenging even for thirty-month-olds.
Instrumental helping is one of the most direct potential behavioral outcomes of shared intentionality, as reflected in the Warneken and Tomasello research (2006, 2007, 2008). Other researchers have reported findings, consistent with theirs, of the instrumental actions of toddlers in response to the needs and desires of others (Demetriou & Hay, 2004; Lamb & Zakhireh, 1997; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, & King, 1979; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). Using a laboratory environment designed to look like a typical home, for example, Rheingold (1982) showed that all of the eighteen-month-olds she observed tried to help the parent complete at least some of the household tasks (such as sweeping up and setting the table), and approximately 80 percent attempted to help an unfamiliar experimenter as well.
These findings indicate that toddlers are capable of instrumental helping, but they are inconsistent in their assistance and their responding can be situation and person specific. During the preschool years, children are capable of greater sophistication in the situations to which they respond helpfully, although they remain somewhat unreliable (Côté, Tremblay, Nagin, Zoccolillo, & Vitaro, 2002; Hastings, Rubin, & DeRose, 2005; Iannotti, 1985). Iannotti (1985), for example, found that over 70 percent of the preschoolers he observed naturalistically in their preschool classrooms exhibited helping, but only 37 percent of these children provided assistance toward an adult experimenter in a more structured assessment. This kind of variability in helping, typical for young children, arises for many reasons: the identity and behavior of the recipient, competing interests and demands, knowledge of how to provide assistance, as well as the temperament and personality of the child.
Sharing is another form of prosocial behavior that can derive from shared intentionality, in which children contribute something for another’s use. Like instrumental helping, sharing begins early but also varies according to the recipient and the circumstances (Hay, Caplan, Castle, & Stimson, 1991; Hay & Murray, 1982). Sharing with a parent, for example, is different from sharing with a peer who may be a competitor. Hay and colleagues (1991) found that whereas one-year-olds were equally likely to share toys with a peer in different circumstances, two-year-olds were more likely to share when there were plenty of toys and were less likely to do so when toys were scarce. With older children, Hastings, McShane, and Parker (2007) found that preschoolers were much more likely to engage in turn taking with peers than to spontaneously share toys with them, perhaps because turn taking provides the opportunity to regain access to the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that sharing, like other prosocial behaviors, becomes more complexly and discriminatingly exhibited with increasing age (Hay & Cook, 2007).
Finally, compassionate responding is also evident in early childhood. Whether manifested as empathy (a response to another’s emotion that is similar to what that person is feeling) or sympathy (a response that is more generally concerned or sorrowful), compassion derives from young children’s sensitivity to the emotions they observe in other people (Eisenberg et al., 2006). Toddlers in the second year often show “concerned attention” to another’s distress (manifested as a downturned mouth and furrowed brow), even though a much smaller proportion of children at this age will follow this compassionate response with direct assistance (Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow et al., 1992). It is not difficult to understand why. Observing another’s distress is an emotionally compelling but motivationally complex experience for a young child, and it can often be difficult for the child to know what—if anything—can be done to alleviate another’s distress in everyday circumstances. When helping is exhibited by children this young, it is often in the form of emotion-specific comforting (e.g., patting the shoulder of the other person) or asking “You okay?” (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow et al., 1992). For this reason, it is important to regard concerned attention as a prosocial response in itself, even though young children may lack the social understanding or capability to intervene more constructively to alleviate distress. With increasing age, preschoolers more often accompany their compassionate responding with inquiries about the cause of another’s distress and engage in more effective forms of assistance (Knafo, Zahn-Waxler, Van Hulle, Robinson, & Rhee, 2008).
Taken together, at least two conclusions are warranted from this brief review of the research. First, a capacity for prosocial responding is evident from a surprisingly early age in simple situations to which toddlers and young children can respond constructively to the needs of other people. To be sure, it is important not to exaggerate the extent of prosocial motivation during this early period. Because of immaturity in self-regulatory capacities, social awareness, and cognitive flexibility, early helping, sharing, and compassionate behavior is inconsistently manifested and situationally influenced. Young children often do not act helpfully in situations in which we might expect them to, and indeed they may laugh or provoke another in distress, especially when they are confused about why the person is feeling that way or what to do. Prosocial behavior increases in reliability, sophistication, and scope in the years that follow (Eisenberg et al., 2006). In the context of a theoretical legacy that has doubted the capacity of young children to respond helpfully at all to the needs and interests of other people, this research underscores that a capacity for prosocial conduct emerges early.
Second, young children become more selective and discriminating in their prosocial behavior with increasing age, and individual differences in prosocial dispositions also become evident (Hay & Cook, 2007). In many respects, it would be surprising if this were not so, in light of the advances in social and emotional understanding that occur in early childhood. But it is important to recognize that prosocial responding does not increase homogeneously throughout the early childhood years, but rather selectively as young children become more attuned to social norms for expected behavior; comprehend others’ behavior in more complex moral, gendered, and social frameworks; calculate the costs of prosocial conduct; begin to understand themselves as moral beings; and gradually comprehend others’ goals and motives in more sophisticated ways (Hay & Cook, 2007; Thompson, 2012). The simple pleasure of a toddler who picks up a marker for another who has dropped it on the floor becomes enlisted into a more complex network of socially motivated behavior as the child matures.
One implication of this conclusion is that early childhood is a significant period for the socialization of prosocial motivation and the development of moral character (Thompson, 2009; Thompson & Newton, 2010). As young children are developing a sense of themselves and others as moral actors, the contributions of parents and educators to their developing understanding can be important to the growth of enduring dispositions to act helpfully toward others.
Early Socialization of Prosocial Motivation
Developmental researchers have focused considerable attention on the parental influences that enhance prosocial motivation in young children (Hastings, Utendale, & Sullivan, 2007). Very little attention has been devoted to the influence of early educators and care providers, although some of what is known about socialization in the home offers potentially useful ideas about comparable influences in the classroom.
In general, parent–child relationships that are characterized by security, warmth, and support are associated with greater prosocial conduct in young children, especially when parents themselves model prosocial behavior, eschew punitive approaches, and have an authoritative parenting style (Hastings, Utendale, et al., 2007). These findings suggest that young children are influenced by parental conduct that is constructive and prosocial toward them, although the findings of this research literature are not entirely straightforward. Important moderating variables include the temperament and sex of the child, as well as the overall emotional quality of the parent–child relationship.
One specific feature of family interaction that received special attention has been parent–child conversations about sociomoral and emotional events. Early childhood is a period of rapidly developing understanding of others’ feelings, needs, and motivations, and shared conversation with an adult can help young children comprehend others’ behavior in relation to these internal processes (Thompson, Laible, & Ontai, 2003). Consistent with this view, several studies by Garner and her colleagues have shown that when mothers talk about emotions in everyday circumstances (such as when reading stories) and explicitly approve of prosocial actions with their young children, their children are more likely to act prosocially toward peers in independent observations (Garner, 2006; Garner, Dunsmore, & Southam-Gerrow, 2008). These findings are consistent with other studies of the influence of emotion-related parent–child discourse on early moral development (Thompson, Meyer, & McGinley, 2006) and suggest that when adults explicitly connect another’s feelings with its causes and outcomes, young children can better comprehend their influence on others’ feelings as well.
Although this research has focused almost exclusively on mother–child conversation, there is little reason to doubt that similar influences also occur in the context of young children’s conversations with other adults, including early educators and child-care providers. Indeed, as we shall see, rich conversational discourse and discussions with young children about people’s feelings is a consistent feature of early educational curricula that are designed to promote social-emotional learning and character education in the early years. When this quality of adult–child conversation is combined with some of the other family influences that foster early prosocial motivation—such as warm and supportive adult–child relationships, adults acting as models of the prosocial conduct they hope children will emulate, avoidance of punitive or coercive child-management techniques, and respect for the individual characteristics of children—it is possible to generalize from the family socialization literature to the classroom practices that might advance prosocial education.
Promoting Prosocial Conduct through Early Childhood Education
In light of these considerations, how can teachers and care providers promote prosocial behavior in young children? A cardinal principle is doing so in a developmentally appropriate fashion, which means that elements of these efforts will be very familiar to those who work primarily with older children and adolescents, and other elements may be unique to interventions with young children. Didactic verbal lessons about the importance of helping others, exposure to moral exemplars, and efforts to develop prosocial reasoning capacities are, for example, likely to be less successful with preschoolers than with older children and adolescents.
Characteristics of Early Childhood Prosocial Education
A well-designed early childhood program of prosocial education is more likely to include the following elements:*
In this kind of classroom environment, promoting prosocial behavior involves more than a focus on helping and sharing and includes the development of attitudes toward others and the self that provide a broad foundation for constructive conduct toward others. Viewed in this light, prosocial education occurs in the context of character development, moral awareness, and social-emotional learning. Here are some examples of how this can occur:
Three five-year-old children are on the outside merry-go-round as the teacher, Scott Smith, pushes them around and around. “Faster, faster!” shout Emma and Juanita. “No, slower!” cries Alisha, “my tummy feels sick!” Scott slows down the merry-go-round and then stops it and says, “It sounds like we have a disagreement about how fast to go.” The two girls say “we want it fast!” Scott says quietly, “I know that it can be fun to go fast, but how does that make Alisha feel?” Emma says quietly, “She doesn’t like it.” The teacher replies, “Right. So what can we do to make sure that she has a good time, too?” All three girls think for a moment. Juanita says, “She should get off.” Scott then asks, “Will Alisha have a good time then?” After a moment, Emma says, “We can have a turn for kids who want to go fast, and then a turn for the kids who want to go slow.” Scott asks the three girls whether that is a good solution and receives enthusiastic nods in return. He then says, “You figured out a fair way for everyone to have a ride on the merry-go-round!”
There are several elements of best practices in early prosocial education encompassed in this vignette. First, the teacher was attentive to the experience of all three children, modeling respect for the preferences of each one. He also ensured that the girls understood clearly how each one felt and what each one wanted to do. This is because preschoolers can be limited in the cognitive flexibility to recognize competing desires and needs when they are emotionally engaged in their own activity. Once they focused appropriately on Alisha’s feelings in this situation, Emma was capable of devising a balanced solution that each child endorsed. Fostering prosocial motivation thus requires attention to young children’s developing social-emotional understanding.
The teacher, Scott, also enlisted the three girls’ problem-solving capabilities in encouraging them to devise a solution to their problem. Such a practice would be less successful with much younger children, but for five-year-olds, this promoted their active engagement with the problem and fostered thoughtful consideration of cooperative strategies. His reminder of the need to create a solution that would be satisfactory for every child was consistent with the classroom expectations for inclusiveness that had been discussed on several occasions during circle time. Finally, Scott concluded the episode by verbalizing what the three girls had accomplished together with an emphasis on the overarching value—“a fair way”—that he intended they would generalize to other social problem-solving tasks.
Here is another example:
The four-year-old group had just begun circle time with their teacher, Will Benware, when Brian blurted out, “Where’s Tien?” Indeed, the group was smaller this morning, and Brian had figured out who was missing. Will had an answer: “Yesterday Tien got very sick, sicker than when you get a cold. His parents decided to take him to the hospital to help him feel better, and that is where he is. His mother told me this morning that Tien will be in the hospital a few more days to make sure that everything is all right.” The children were quiet for a few moments. Then Will asked them, “What do you think it feels like to be in the hospital?” Several children needed an explanation of what a hospital is before they could respond, but within a few moments they offered words like “sad” and “scared” and “he wishes he could be in preschool instead.” Then Will asked, “Do you think there is anything we can do to help Tien feel better?” The children thought a little longer, and then Maiesha said, “We could get him some medicine!” Will replied, “The doctors are doing that. Any other ideas?” Then Jamaal said, “We can make pictures that he can look at!” The children agreed that this was a good idea, and with their teacher’s help, they went to drawing tables with markers, paper, and pencils, and fifteen minutes later there was a small stack of pictures to give to Tien’s mother later in the day. Will said to the children, “You have made some drawings that will remind Tien of preschool and tell him that we miss him!”
In this complex experience, these four-year-olds learned about the sudden illness of one of their classmates, the reasons that people go to hospitals, and a little about the experience of being hospitalized. Their teacher wisely did not provide information that was beyond their capacities for comprehension, but Will drew their attention to the caring actions of adults in Tien’s life, such as his parents and the doctors. Will also encouraged the children’s emotional role-taking capacities by asking them to imagine what Tien was feeling in the hospital. This was necessary before he could ask them subsequently to ponder whether they could do anything to help him feel better. Once again, social-emotional understanding was necessary before prosocial initiatives could be fostered in these young children.
Rather than suggesting steps the children could take, Will relied on the children’s own ideas. Most of the time, this requires some filtering of practical and unpractical solutions. But once an appropriate strategy was identified, the teacher facilitated enactment of the plan by the children, who wished to participate. Finally, Will summarized with words what the children had accomplished, why it would be important to Tien, and the thoughts and feelings that would result to ensure that these connections would be clear to these young children.
These vignettes, and the one that opens this chapter, illustrate that early prosocial education—like early childhood education more generally—relies on somewhat different approaches compared to the education of older children and adolescents. Education is practical as well as didactic, incorporated into everyday experiences that are exploited by a thoughtful teacher to create learning opportunities. In the education of young children, words are used not only to provoke thought and understanding but also to make explicit the psychological processes—feelings, needs, and concerns—that underlie behavior and toward which prosocial efforts can be oriented. This is because these aspects of psychological understanding are cutting-edge conceptual developments for children of this age. Effective learning by young children is also active learning, never passive, because their most engaged thinking and understanding is provoked by meaningful, personal experiences. This requires soliciting and expanding on their own ideas and strategies and provoking their thinking with new perspectives or knowledge.
Early prosocial education is also framed by the developing competencies of young children, which are different from the emergent skills of older children and adolescents. By contrast with the salient challenges of peer pressure, responsible decision making, and intergroup understanding at older ages, in early childhood the challenges of self-regulation and the emergence of a psychological self-concept are important features of the context in which prosocial motivation develops. An effective prosocial education program must thus help young children perceive themselves as helpful, responsible group citizens and assist them with the challenges of impulse control. Finally, the relational context of learning is also central to early childhood, especially within the broader interpersonal climate of the classroom. Young children’s interactions with peers as well as teachers help to provoke and motivate new understanding, especially when social interaction and psychological understanding are concerned.
Promising Curricular Avenues
Although early childhood is when the foundations of moral character and prosocial motivation begin to take shape, there has been much less attention to the development of programs to promote prosocial education in the early years compared to later ages. There are several reasons why this is true. First, across the developmental spectrum, educational curricula and intervention programs tend to focus more on remedying behavioral problems than promoting prosocial conduct. This problem-focused approach is perhaps a natural response to the concerns evoked by children’s behavioral problems because these problems can be daunting and sometimes frightening (especially in older children and adolescents). Indeed, even for curricular programs with a prosocial education component, outcome evaluations of these curricula rarely focus on whether children act more helpfully or constructively as a result. Instead, the focus is on whether social problems diminish and socially appropriate conduct improves. Because it is unwise to assume that antisocial and prosocial behavior are inversely associated (Hastings, Utendale, et al., 2007), outcome studies that find diminished behavioral problems in target samples provide little insight into whether children are also acting more prosocially as a consequence.
In addition, whereas the social problems of young children are conventionally attributed to self-correcting issues of adjustment or immaturity, these problems are perceived as reflecting more concerning characterological deficiencies in older children and adolescents. Consequently, there are fewer curricular programs devoted to the behavior of young children, and some of them are derivatives of successful curricula that were previously developed for older children. Attention to the prosocial education of preschoolers tends to be low in the priorities of educational planners or intervention specialists.
This situation is beginning to evolve, however, in part owing to the recognition that problems in school achievement have early origins and that, for many young children, social and emotional difficulties help to account for early achievement outcomes. Because of this, many of these programs were designed to address the needs of at-risk young children, such as those participating in Head Start or other targeted early intervention programs, or whose families are in poverty or live in marginal neighborhoods. Even so, there is relatively little that can be confidently concluded about the efficacy of these curricula for fostering more helpful, constructive social conduct in young children, which is why these programs are described in this section as “promising.” None of the programs reviewed below directly assessed prosocial behavior as an outcome of the curriculum, and in all cases a relatively small component of the curriculum was explicitly focused on fostering prosocial conduct. The larger focus of all of the curricula discussed below was on managing or averting behavioral problems and promoting socially appropriate conduct. The programs discussed below have the benefit, however, of flexible incorporation into the classroom format. Most of these curricular interventions are designed to be incorporated into existing comprehensive early childhood education curricula, such as High Scope, which contributes to their ease of implementation (for reviews, see Domitrovich, Moore, Thompson, & the Collaborative for the Advancement of Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning Preschool to Elementary Assessment Workgroup, in press; Joseph & Strain, 2003).
Preschool PATHS
One of the most promising programs for young children is Preschool PATHS (Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies) (Domitrovich, Greenberg, Cortes, & Kusche, 1999), based on the PATHS curriculum for older children (Kusche & Greenberg, 1994). The primary goals of Preschool PATHS is to promote positive peer relationships, enhance problem-solving skills, improve self-control, enhance young children’s capacities to label and recognize emotions, and foster a more positive classroom environment. The program consists of a thirty-three-week curriculum with lessons in four domains: (1) prosocial friendship skills, (2) emotional understanding and emotional expression skills, (3) self-control, and (4) problem-solving skills. Methods include stories and discussions, puppets, role-playing, songs, cooperative projects and games, and other activities. Teachers are encouraged to incorporate social-emotional learning into everyday experiences in the classroom throughout the day.
In an evaluation study conducted in Head Start classrooms, child measures and teacher and parent assessments were obtained both before and after nine months of the Preschool PATHS curriculum (Domitrovich, Cortes, & Greenberg, 2007). Children in the curriculum exhibited higher levels of emotional understanding and were rated as more socially competent by teachers and parents than children in the non-PATHS comparison group. Similar outcomes were obtained when the Preschool PATHS approach was integrated with a language and literacy intervention called the Head Start REDI (REsearch-based, Developmentally Informed) program. After one year, children in the intervention group were higher in emotional understanding, social problem solving, and social behavior compared to those in the comparison group, as well as showing cognitive and language gains (Bierman et al., 2008). (For more on PATHS, see case study A accompanying Chapter 11, “Implementing the PATHS Program in Birmingham, UK.”)
Second Step
Another promising program, the Second Step curriculum, was designed as a violence prevention program by the Committee for Children (1991), a Seattle nonprofit agency. It was thus intended as a primary prevention program to decrease aggression and promote more positive social behavior in preschool and kindergarten children. It consists of twenty-eight sessions provided once or twice weekly throughout the course of an academic year, with themes focusing on empathy and emotional understanding, constructive social problem solving, and emotion management. Methods include stories with puppets and photographs, role-playing activities, and discussion in the classroom. Teachers are encouraged to transfer these lessons to other classroom experiences, and there are follow-up activities that parents can use.
An outcome evaluation of Second Step was conducted in preschool and kindergarten classrooms serving children in Chicago public housing projects (McMahon, Washburn, Felix, Yakin, & Childrey, 2000). Children were interviewed and observer and teacher ratings were obtained in the fall and again in the spring of the academic year after the curriculum was concluded. Preschoolers and kindergarteners both showed significant gains over time in emotional understanding and social problem-solving skills, and observations indicated significantly decreased disruptive behavior and verbal and physical aggression, although there were no changes in teacher ratings of children’s social behavior. There was no comparison group in this study, however, so it is impossible to know whether these changes might have occurred without the intervention.
The Incredible Years
A third promising early childhood curriculum is called The Incredible Years (Dinosaur School) (Webster-Stratton, 1990; Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2010). The goal of this program is to promote preschool children’s social competence, emotion self-regulation, and positive social behavior with special attention to children from high-risk populations and those identified with conduct disorders. The curriculum consists of biweekly lessons over several months organized according to seven units that include emotional literacy, empathy or perspective taking, prosocial skills, emotional understanding, anger management, social problem-solving skills, and communication skills. Methods include the use of videotape modeling, role-play, puppets, games, group discussion, picture cue cards, and promotion and reinforcement of specific skills in the context of circle time activities as well as small-group activities. There is a classroom curriculum with primary prevention goals as well as a small-group therapy format for children with identified social problems. There is also a significant teacher training component of the Incredible Years curriculum and a parent training curriculum that can be used independently of the teacher and child components (see Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2007).
The Incredible Years curriculum has been the focus of numerous well-designed evaluation studies focused on different components of the program and different recipient populations (for a review, see Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2010). In one of the most recent studies, Webster-Stratton, Reid, and Stoolmiller (2008) assessed the outcomes of the combined child-focused and teacher training programs in a randomized trial with 1,768 children in preschool Head Start, kindergarten, and first-grade classrooms in socioeconomically at-risk neighborhoods. Assessments were conducted in the fall and again in the spring, after the program had been in effect for the academic year. Compared to children in the control group, children in the Incredible Years program displayed greater improvement in school readiness (indexed by behaviors reflecting self-regulation and social competence) and fewer conduct problems based on classroom observations. Child measures also indicated that Incredible Years children showed greater improvement in identifying feelings and in providing positive rather than negative solutions to a social problem-solving task. Other evaluations of this program have yielded consistent results (Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2010). In these studies, however, findings are reported for the entire study sample, including kindergarteners and first graders, which makes it difficult to know how much this program benefits preschoolers specifically.
ICPS
ICPS is a social skills curriculum that stands for I Can Problem Solve or, alternatively, Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving (Shure, 1992, 2001; Shure & Spivack, 1982). It is designed to be used by early childhood educators in small groups to help children solve interpersonal problems, where they are taught to identify multiple response options to the social problems they are facing, recognizing relevant thoughts, feelings, and motives, and then to evaluate each of these alternatives in a systematic manner. Methods incorporated into the fifty-nine lessons include puppets, games, dialogues, and role-playing exercises, and the curriculum lasts for three months. A review of evaluation research by Denham and Almeida (1987) indicated that preschoolers who participated in this program successfully acquired many of the intended outcomes of the curriculum and exhibited positive behavior change (see also Shure, 2001).
The Emotion Course
The Emotion Course is based on developmental emotions theory and the importance of emotional understanding and self-regulation to social competence in early childhood (Izard, 2001; Izard et al., 2001). The curriculum consists of twenty-two lessons focused on discrete emotions in which preschoolers learn to recognize and label these emotions and develop skills in emotion regulation. Methods include puppet vignettes, interactive reading and games, storybooks, emotion expression posters, and skill coaching by teachers. Several randomized-trial evaluations conducted with children in Head Start classrooms each found that children in the intervention group had, at the end of the program, better emotion knowledge and were better able to regulate their emotions (with some decrease in negative emotion expressions); in one study, they also exhibited greater social competence (Izard, Trentacosta, King, & Mostow, 2004; Izard et al., 2008).
Al’s Pals
Finally, Al’s Pals (Wingspan LLC, 1999) is based on resiliency research; it was designed to increase social-emotional competence and reduce risk factors for antisocial behavior, and it is oriented toward at-risk children from preschool through early elementary school. The curriculum consists of forty-six lessons over the course of twenty-three weeks, with themes of fostering positive coping, social competence, effective social problem solving, positive beliefs about the self, understanding and expressing emotions, and self-regulation, along with lessons about substance abuse and violence prevention. Curricular methods include puppet-led discussions, role-playing, reading and music, guided creative play, and brainstorming, and teachers are encouraged to incorporate curricular concepts into daily practices. There is some outcome evidence that participation in Al’s Pals is associated with improved teacher ratings of child behavior problems, social competence, and coping, although the findings do not permit an assessment of whether preschoolers in particular benefit from this curriculum (see Lynch, Geller, & Schmidt, 2004).
The six early childhood curricula discussed here are the strongest of those that foster prosocial conduct and constructive social behavior in young children based on their design and on relevant evaluation research. They are also representative of other programs in the field. They reflect many of the characteristics of best practices in early childhood education identified earlier, as well as the lessons of research on early prosocial development in young children. They share an emphasis on promoting social and emotional understanding as part of a broader curriculum in character education, a focus on activities that promote young children’s active learning, the use of adult–child conversations to enhance psychological understanding and social problem solving, experiences to strengthen children’s self-regulatory capacities (especially skills at emotion management), enlisting children’s ideas into social problem-solving exercises, and encouragement of the generalization of lessons to everyday experience in the classroom. Although the development, evaluation, and scaling up of curricular models is still in the relatively early stages—especially compared with programs for older children and adolescents—these “promising” strategies provide a good basis for future work.
There are other early childhood education curricula that are not directly focused on improving social-emotional functioning but which may have positive indirect benefits for young children. These curricular models merit attention because of additional ideas they can provide early educators about practices that may support early character education. An example is Tools of the Mind, a curriculum based on the ideas of Vygotskian theory and designed to strengthen preschoolers’ self-regulatory skills (Bodrova & Leong, 2007). The core curriculum includes forty activities that focus on the development of skills of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, which are key aspects of young children’s self-regulatory competence (see the accompanying case study B, “Implementing an Evidence-Based Preschool Program: A Superintendent’s Perspective on Tools of the Mind”). These activities often involve children working together and include pretend play, structured games involving self-regulation (e.g., the “Freeze” game), and activities that can incorporate other curricular goals (such as creating stories from picture books in pairs). Evaluation studies of this curriculum indicate that it improves preschoolers’ self-regulatory skills and social conduct, although its impact on cognitive functioning remains uncertain (Barnett et al., 2008; Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro, 2007). Although it would be unwise to use Tools of the Mind as a curriculum to promote young children’s prosocial conduct, it offers ideas for how early childhood educators can foster competency in self-regulation in light of how often impulsivity is an impediment to prosocial behavior.
Besides these child-focused curricula, it is important to note that there are also a handful of teacher-focused curricula that are designed to alter the quality of classroom instructional practices and teacher–child relationships. Some of these curricula are linked to the child-focused programs reviewed earlier, but their outcome evaluations typically focus on changes in teacher behavior and only secondarily on improved social and emotional behavior of children in the classroom. These curricula have not been the focus of this review, but they are discussed elsewhere (see Domitrovich et al., in press). As earlier noted, there are also a small number of parent-focused programs that are linked to the child-focused curricula described above. Taken together, some program planners have wisely understood that improving child outcomes requires multifaceted strategies that should enlist the integrated efforts of multiple adults in the child’s world.
The good news, then, is that there are some outstanding program models to use and adapt for purposes of the prosocial education of young children. The bad news, however, is that despite these advances, relatively little is known about the curricular practices that specifically advance prosocial conduct in young children. Although the developmental research literature draws our attention to key ingredients—warm, supportive adult–child relationships; rich conversations that illuminate the psychological needs of other people; adults who model prosocial conduct in their behavior toward children; and avoidance of punitive or coercive child-management practices—and these ingredients have been implemented into thoughtfully designed early childhood curricula, the relevant evaluation research tells us little about the consequences of these curricula for early prosocial conduct per se. We can conclude that these program models appear to do a fine job of promoting positive social behavior and social competence in young children and of reducing the incidence of negative behavior. We must await further research to understand whether they have comparable consequences for the development of prosocial motivation.
Conclusion
In recent decades, administrators in departments of education throughout the country have developed statewide learning guidelines in preschool education to parallel and complement long-standing learning standards for K–12 education (Scott-Little, Kagan, & Frelow, 2003, 2006). The initial focus of these learning guidelines was on language and literacy, mathematics, and other conventional academic areas. Increasingly, however, preschool educators pushed to include social-emotional learning in these guidelines, even though they are often absent from K–12 standards, recognizing the importance of young children’s emotional understanding and social functioning to their success in classroom learning. They also recognized that the difficulties of some at-risk children in early learning derive primarily not from their cognitive limitations but from problems in self-regulation, social competence, self-confidence, and other socioemotional capacities.
In a much smaller number of states, preschool learning guidelines in areas related to citizenship, responsible conduct, and even social studies have begun to appear.† Although these learning guidelines sometimes appear to have the naive intention of furthering the parallel between preschool and K–12 learning standards, in other states they seem to reflect a more thoughtful appraisal of the developmental opportunities of the early childhood years. Young children are citizens of their early education classrooms or care centers, where they learn how to get along responsibly with adults and other children. In group education and care, they develop skills in social interaction and emotional understanding in the context of daily experience with other children and adults. They learn about distributive justice (or “fairness”) in the context of sharing resources during play or classroom projects. In many of their educational settings, they become acquainted with human diversity in the languages, clothing, foods, and behaviors they observe around them. And in the midst of this learning, they also have frequent opportunities to act helpfully, generously, and compassionately toward others.
Because developmental research shows that young children have an early sensitivity to the feelings, goals, and desires of other people and can share those intentional goals in helpful acts, the opportunities to foster an orientation toward prosocial conduct in the early years are profound. The field of prosocial education has much to gain from a new attention to early childhood.
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*An outstanding resource for early childhood educators who are interested in classroom practices that promote early social-emotional learning and social competence is the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning at Vanderbilt University, http://csefel.vanderbilt.edu.
†See, for example, California Department of Education (in press). California preschool curriculum framework: Vol. 3. History/social science. Sacramento, CA: Author. Accessed at http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re.