Socio-Emotional Well-being of Kindergartners

Abstract

Early childhood is crucial for learning how to react to stress, make friends, handle conflict, care for others, wait patiently, and follow the rules. A positive social and emotional development is vital to child growth. The ongoing health crisis preventing kindergartners from socializing with their peers as this is believed to be effective in developing their well-being prompted the researcher to advance this study, particularly to determine the socio-emotional well-being of kindergartners in San Fernando North Central School as input to a kindergartner's socio-emotional program. A descriptive-developmental research design was used to gather the needed data from the 67 kindergarten parents during the school year 2020-2021 through an adopted and validated survey questionnaire. As monitored by the Ethics Review Board of the College, the researcher strictly observed the outlined research protocols to ensure that the well-being of the respondents was assured and to achieve the trustworthiness of the gathered data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to treat the gathered data. The findings showed that the kindergarten pupils generally had a very high level of socio-emotional development. Grouping the seven dimensions of socio-emotional development, the respondents' kindergartners were rated highest in optimism, self-connectedness/belonging, and social skills and lowest in emotional regulation, self-concept, social responsibility, and self-regulation. Furthermore, the seven dimensions were all significantly interrelated in the socio-emotional development of the kindergartners. Based on the findings of this study, the preschoolers have very highly developed socio-emotional constructs as rated by their parents and guardians. Their different constructs were also highly related to each other. Despite the high level of the constructs, the preschoolers still need guidance, support, and information from their significant others as dictated by the high relationship of the different constructs, which shows that the development of the other constructs impacts the well-being of an individual. This leads to conceptualizing a development program by integrating activities in the module as essential ways to help preschoolers imbibe values while learning the lessons. Given this, the researcher strongly recommends adopting the developed kindergarten socio-emotional development program to sustain the rounded socio-emotional development of kindergartners.