Emotional development involves the child’s experience, expressions and management of emotions and the ability to establish a positive and rewarding relationship with others. Toddlers face lots of emotional moments at home or in childcare when interacting with their family members and peers. They learn how to express and handle their emotions from people they are in contact with. Mirroring is the most common way for toddlers when it comes to emotional development. Family members, relatives, educators and peers usually become their role models in this regard, thus it is vital for them to be directly and indirectly exposed to appropriate ways of expressing and managing emotional moments. Here the role of such role models and external influencers become extremely important.

At Kindaburra, one of our key objectives is to support the emotional development of children through a variety of strategies including intentional teaching. Children are taught both directly and indirectly how to appropriately respond to emotional situations. Reading books, running puppet shows, modelling the right response and watching video-clips are some examples of intentional teaching methods. In situations such as separation from parents at drop-off times and disagreements with peers in plays, toddlers are starting to understand how their behaviour affects others and how other people's behaviour affects them. Educators attend to children at times of discomfort to calm them down through techniques which, amongst others, include deep breathing, staying close to the child and so on. They also use various strategies to reinforce children’s ability to handle emotional moments appropriately and demonstrate self-regulation. 

To this effect, while children’s emotional well-being is strengthened, they learn how to interact with care, empathy and respect when dealing with others.  

Our fundamental approach is to set goals for each child and address their needs and interests in our fortnightly programming and activities. In particular, we take into account needs of children in terms of emotional development when setting goals and in our programming. We believe that emotional strength and well-being of children is as important as other areas of development.

For further reading, please refer to this link.