Educators' responses to gender and emotion in educator-child reminiscing vignettes

Research Findings: Elaborative, emotion-rich reminiscing between parents and young children has important developmental benefits, and emerging research has extended this work to early childhood educators. This study investigated how educators’ self-reported preferred reminiscing style and emotional language differed according to children’s gender and emotion. Participants included 168 Australian early childhood educators, each of whom completed the Gendered Emotion Beliefs Scale, the Caregiver-Child Reminiscence Scale, and responded to six reminiscing vignettes with varied protagonist gender and emotion. The four response options for each vignette mapped educator preferences for high or low elaboration and high or low emotion content. A binomial logistic regression revealed that educators’ reminiscing preferences showed no significant relationship with the protagonist child’s gender. However, participants favored responses with emotion language, particularly when the child displayed sadness or anger, and this preference was associated with having a university qualification. Practice or Policy: Findings show that educators did not differentiate responses based on gender but were more likely to respond in an emotionally coaching manner to children expressing negative emotions. This highlights the potential for reminiscing to contribute to supportive classroom environments for socio-emotional development, with a connection to educator qualifications suggesting that higher qualifications lead to enhanced classroom practices.