Bidirectional Relations Between Early Teacher-Child Relationship And Children's Social Adjustment Among Preschoolers:a Longitudinal Study

Early Teacher-child Relationship refers to a psychological relationship of the emotion, cognition and behavioral interaction. It's one of the basic relationships between teacher s and children, including closeness, conflict and dependency. Social adjustment refers to children's social function features in a particular social cultural background, which is a result of children's socialization. It including positive adjustment behavior such as active, acclaimed, sensitive, cooperation, as well as passive adjustment behavior such as attack, discipline, shyness, anxiety, withdrawal and so on. A large number of abroad studies have found that early teacher-child relationship would affect children's social adjustment, on the contrary, the behavior of children in kindergarten would react on the relationship between teachers and children. Most previous study only investigated the unidirectional effect of early teacher-child relationship with child development, whereas they paid little attention to the interaction relationship between the two variables. Due to the limitation of sample or test method, there were some discrepancy between early teacher-child relationship and children's adjustment's bidirectional relationship from different study, so it still needed to be further discussed. Therefore, in order to understand the causality of early teacher-child relationship and children's social adjustment under the background of Chinese culture, this study adopted cross-lagged regression analysis to examine the bidirectional relationship between early teacher-child relationship and social adjustment of children through three years track design. Participants in study were 547 children and their teachers. The results indicated that: (1) In the kindergarten stage, early teacher-child relationship and children social adjustment remained relatively stable. (2) At the same time point, there was a significant correlation between each index of early teacher-child relationship and children social adjustment. (3) The reciprocal influences were observed between closeness and children's social adjustment: After controlled the variables'continuity, post-test sensitive-cooperative behavior in children was positively predicted by baseline closeness teacher-child relationship, post-test disciplinary-aggressive behavior in children was negatively predicted by baseline closeness teacher-child relationship; On the contrary, post-test closeness was positively predicted by baseline sensitive-cooperative behavior, and was negatively predicted by baseline disciplinary-aggressive behavior. (4) The reciprocal influences were observed between conflict and children's social adjustment: After controlled the variables'continuity, post-test disciplinary-aggressive and shy-anxious behavior in children was positively predicted by baseline conflict teacher-child relationship, post-test sensitive-cooperative behavior in children was negatively predicted by baseline closeness teacher-child relationship; On the contrary, post-test conflict was positively predicted by baseline disciplinary-aggressive and shy-anxious behavior, and was negatively predicted by baseline sensitive-cooperative behavior.The reciprocal influences were observed between dependency and children's social adjustment:After controlled the variables'continuity, post-test disciplinary-aggressive and shy-anxious behavior in children was positively predicted by baseline dependency teacher-child relationship, post-test sensitive-cooperative behavior in children was negatively predicted by baseline dependency teacher-child relationship; On the contrary, post-test dependency was positively predicted by baseline disciplinary-aggressive and shy-anxious behavior, and was negatively predicted by baseline sensitive-cooperative behavior.