Children's Relationships with Child Care Teachers: Stability and Concordance with Parental Attachments

Abstract

In order to examine caregiving relationships of children enrolled in childcare, two longitudinal samples of children, n = 72 and n = 106, were followed from infancy through preschool. Maternal attachment as assessed by the Strange Situation, 4-year-old reunion behavior, and by the Attachment Q-Set tended to be stable across time. Children's teacher-child relationship quality, as measured by the Attachment Q-Set, was stable if the teacher remained the same. When the teacher changed, teacher-child relationship quality tended to be unstable until the children were 30 months old. After 30 months, relationship quality with teachers tended to be stable regardless of whether or not the teacher changed. Maternal and teacher relationships were nonconcordant. There were few interactions between adult caregiver relationship quality and age of entry into child care or intensity of child care.

Examining Mexican-Heritage Children's Representations of Relationships With Mothers and Teachers in Preschool

“…The quality of the child-teacher attachment relationship becomes important when the teacher is the child's caregiver outside of the home and is then responsible for keeping the child safe, both in the physical and emotional sense, when the child is not with his or her mother (Howes & Hamilton, 1992b).…”

Increased Family Involvement in School Predicts Improved Child–Teacher Relationships and Feelings About School for Low-Income Children

“…Following attachment theory, theory on social-emotional relationships between children and their teachers suggests that emotional closeness and support from teachers likely promote positive representations of self, teachers, and the more general schooling context (e.g., Baker, 2006;Howes & Hamilton, 1992;Howes & Matheson, 1992). Thus children who experience positive relationships with their teachers may develop more positive attitudes toward learning and school, thereby increasing academic engagement, motivation, and, in turn, achievement (Birch & Ladd, Eccles, 1993;Pianta & Steinberg, 1992;Valeski & Stipek, 2001).…”

Attachment and play in child care centres: Reliability and validity of the attachment Q-sort for mothers and professional caregivers in Italy

“…In all these cases, the relationship with a nonparental caregiver is an important part of the child's experience. In several respects, the nonparental caregiver may function as a substitute parent: He or she plays with the child but is also responsible for keeping the child physically and emotionally safe in the absence of the parents (Howes & Hamilton, 1992b). In Italy, almost half of the women between 15 and 34 years old work outside their homes 1 (Istat, 1996).…”

“…This means that the strategies for dealing with the stressful situation in presence of the professional caregiver are displayed in the usual sense. Moreover, (b) discordance between the quality of the attachment relationship to the parent and to the caregiver (Goossens & van IJzendoorn, 1990;Howes & Hamilton, 1992b;Sagi et al, 1995) may imply that the infant-caregiver attachment is a unique re ection of the dyad's history of interactions instead of an extension of the infant-parent attachment. As predicted by attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), (c) children have been shown to develop preferences for caregivers over less familiar adults in the day care centre (Barnas & Cummings, 1994;Cummings, 1980).…”