Social-Emotional and Behavioral Health and Development are the Foundations of Learning

September 14, 2015
Photo of mothers playing with babies.

Image removed.By Shantel Meek, PhD, Senior Policy Advisor for Early Childhood Development and Linda K. Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Development

Learning is a social process. From the first days of life, young children learn through socially interacting with the adults in their lives. Throughout infancy and early childhood, young children are sensitive to and read social cues from trusted caregivers. They use those cues to guide what they should learn and what they should do; what they should attend to and what they should ignore; what is safe and what they should be afraid of. This early social awareness enables the earliest learning.

Learning requires a set of social and emotional competencies that build on each other and are developed over time. These competencies can only be fostered in the context of warm, trusting and secure relationships. In the safe havens of these relationships, adults guide children’s learning and development, expose them to new experiences, and provide the emotional security that enables them to explore new concepts in the world around them.

Given the strong link between relationships, social-emotional development, and learning, it is not surprising that there is a large and growing research base showing a robust connection between social-emotional development and academic success. Studies indicate that children who have securely attached relationships with trusting adults are more advanced in their cognitive and language development and show greater achievement in school. Preschoolers with strong social-emotional skills and behavior regulation tend to have higher attention skills and develop better early literacy, vocabulary and math skills. In the school years, these children demonstrate greater academic achievement and wellness. A recent meta-analysis examining data from over 270,000 children, found that those engaged in social-emotional learning programs at school, demonstrated an 11 to 17 percentile gain in achievement.

But social-emotional skills are not only influential across childhood and adolescence; early social-emotional skills have been linked to outcomes decades later in adulthood. A 20-year study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the American Journal of Public Health this summer, found that kindergartners who demonstrated greater social competence, as reported by teachers, were more likely to reach higher levels of education and higher-paying jobs and less likely to drop out of school and need government assistance.

In fact, for every point increase in kindergartners’ social competence, children were:

  • 54 percent more likely to earn a high school diploma
  • Twice as likely to attain a college degree in early adulthood
  • 46 percent more likely to have a full time job at the age of 25

For every point decrease, they had:

  • 67 percent higher likelihood of having been arrested by age 25
  • 82 percent higher rate of recent marijuana usage
  • 82 percent higher likelihood of being in or on a waiting list for public housing

It is clear that social-emotional and behavioral development is a central and consequential component of development that is fostered within securely attached relationships. Importantly, these relationships include relationships with child care providers and other early educators. Nearly 11 million children under the age of 5, approximately 63 percent of the nation’s children in this age group, are in some type of child care arrangement each week, for an average of 36 hours.  About a million children are served in Head Start programs each year and more than 1.3 million children attend state preschool programs. Children can and do develop emotional attachment to their early educators and providers, and the quality of those relationships predicts children’s success in the classroom and beyond.

It is critical that the early childhood workforce has a deep understanding and strong competencies to foster children’s social-emotional and behavioral health, especially infant/toddler teachers who play such a prominent role in children’s earliest experiences. That is why this week we released an informational memorandum (IM) highlighting policies that states can implement to support children’s social-emotional and behavioral development, referencing the reauthorized Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG).

The IM is a continuation of our work promoting the importance of social-emotional and behavioral development. Last fall, we released a joint policy statement on expulsion and suspension practices (PDF) and launched a new website with several free resources for multiple audiences to aid in efforts to prevent, limit and ultimately eliminate expulsion and suspension practices in early learning settings. Last spring, we launched Birth to Five: Watch Me Thrive!, an initiative to promote universal developmental and behavioral screening. We also launched a valid and reliable assessment of family-teacher relationships, called the Family and Provider/Teacher Relationship Quality measure, because the family-provider/teacher connection is critical to healthy social-emotional and behavioral development. Later this year we will be releasing another joint policy statement on Family Engagement.

We hope you find the IM, the expulsion policy statement, and the other resources useful in your work to improve the social-emotional and behavioral supports we offer our youngest children and their families.

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