Record Detail

The primary purpose of this study was to inves-tigate relationships between adults’ emotional intelligence and knowledge of children’s social-emotional competence (SEC). A secondary purpose was to explore relationships between child care workers’ education, time spent work-ing in child care, and their knowledge of children’s social-emotional competence. Participants included adult male and female child care workers (n=95) as well as adults who were not employed in child care (n=76). Participants were administered a self report emotional intelligence scale and an instrument that assessed their knowledge of children’s SEC. Findings revealed a significant positive relationship between emotional intelligence and knowledge of children’s SEC for all participants. For child care workers, level of edu-cation was not related to knowledge of children’s SEC, and time spent working in child care was significantly negatively related to knowledge of children’s SEC. Emotional intel-ligence training is implicated as a way to help early child-hood educators become more effective at fostering children’s emotional development