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Parent-child and teacher-child relationships are important correlates of children’s socioemotional competencies. However, less is known about whether these relationship qualities play a role in shaping the early development of socioemotional competencies in very young children attending childcare group settings. The current study aims to address this gap and to explore how child gender may moderate these associations. The participants included 395 children (203 girls; Mage = 21.18 months, SD = 10.26 months) enrolled in childcare centres, along with their parents and teachers. Parents reported on children’s socioemotional competencies as well as their relationship quality with children, and teachers reported on their relationship quality with children. Multiple group structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the results. The findings showed that both parent-child and teacher-child closeness were positively associated with children’s social competence, whereas teacher-child closeness was negatively associated with children’s anxiety behaviour. Furthermore, gender differences were observed in these associations. Teacher-child closeness was a significant predictor of social competence exclusively among girls, while parent-child closeness was a significant predictor of anxiety behaviours solely among boys. Findings suggested that parents and teachers may consider implementing tailored strategies when interacting with boys and girls who experience socioemotional difficulties in group settings in the early years.

Background Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to represent one's own and others' mental states, and emotion understanding involves appropriately comprehending and responding to others' emotional cues in social interactions. Individual differences in mind and emotion understanding have been associated strongly with verbal ability and interaction and, as such, existing training for children's ToM and emotion understanding is mostly language-based. Building on the literature on embodied cognition, this study proposes that mind and emotion understanding could be facilitated by one's visuospatial experience in simulating other's frames of reference. Methods This protocol consists of two training studies. Study 1 will examine if visuospatial perspective-taking training promotes ToM and emotion understanding. Participants will consist of 96 4.5-year-olds and will be randomly assigned to one of two training groups: the altercentric block building group (trained to be visuospatial perspective-takers), or the egocentric block building group (no visuospatial perspective-taking is involved). Study 2 will compare the engagement of visuospatial perspective-taking and verbal interaction in the development of mind and emotion understanding. Participants will consist of 120 4.5-year-olds. They will be randomly assigned to one of three training groups: the socialized altercentric block building (both visuospatial perspective-taking and verbal interaction), the parallel altercentric block building (visuospatial perspective-taking only), or the paired dialogic reading (verbal interaction only). Conclusions In terms of theoretical implications, the potential causal relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and ToM and emotion understanding may shed new insights on what underlies the development of mental state understanding. The findings of this study also have practical implications: researchers and educators may popularize visuospatial perspective-taking training in the form of block-building games if it is found to be effective in complementing conventional language-based theory-of-mind training.