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Background: Providing quality and equitable professional development (PD) to early care and education (ECE) providers can support high-quality care for young children. Coaching is a common way of delivering PD that has demonstrated positive impacts on teacher practices, however the field has yet to summarize which providers receive coaching, who provides coaching, the match between providers and coaches, and if researchers are examining the effectiveness of their interventions for different populations of providers. Objective: The current study conducted a systematic literature review to examine these characteristics. Method: A search was conducted using PsychInfo and ERIC between 2009 and 2020, with further searches conducted in Google Scholar and through backwards citation chaining. In total, 161 peer-reviewed articles representing 117 unique, U.S.-based studies were included in this systematic review. Results: More coaching research is conducted in urban versus rural areas; at Head Start, center-based, and public pre-school programs compared to other ECE settings; and with 3–5-year-old children compared with infants and toddlers. ECE providers receiving coaching were predominantly White, held a bachelor's degree, and spoke English. Eighty-one percent of studies reported some information about coaches' backgrounds, but only 15% included information about the coaches' race, ethnicity, and/or language spoken. Conclusion: Findings indicate researchers need to be more explicit in their research design and dissemination efforts regarding their target populations and purveyors of their coaching interventions. The field needs to reflect on the potential inequities regarding who receives coaching-inclusive interventions based on providers' geography and demographic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Quality early childhood education (ECE) sets the foundation for children's healthy development. Families make choices regarding the ECE options available to them, and families who desire smaller, more personal, flexible, and less expensive options, often select family child care (FCC) providers over center-based care. In addition, trending research in the United States indicates that there is a decline of FCC providers leading to a gap in the available resources for families. Objective: This study explored the experiences of family child care providers regarding the challenges and benefits of their profession. Methods: Two focus groups (N = 27) comprised of licensed and unlicensed FCC providers were conducted to understand their perspectives on the perceived challenges and benefits of their work. Results: Using Bromer and Korfmacher's conceptual model of high-quality support, we conducted a thematic analysis and found providers identified several challenges including: feeling uncomfortable in their home, payment and scheduling issues, frustration with parents, limited resources, and role conflicts. Providers also described strategies for managing their family childcare program including utilizing critical early childhood education learning strategies with children, separating personal and work spaces, using contracts, and the importance of networking with other professionals. Providers also shared benefits of FCC for the children in their care, themselves, and their own families. Conclusions: The findings align with Bromer and Korfmacher's (2017) conceptual model and suggest a need for networking opportunities to provide information and support amongst FCC providers, improved resource sharing, more accessible funding opportunities, and the need for business training tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cocaring encompasses how parents and teachers work together to coordinate caregiving. Two critical components of cocaring have demonstrated importance for child and parent well-being: support and undermining. Although parent-teacher relationships have been studied via qualitative interviews and through self-administered questionnaires, little observational research has been conducted. This study sought to develop an observational approach to measure the quality of cocaring relationships by recording and coding parent-teacher interactions. Eighteen mother-teacher dyads of 6- to 36-month-old children from six childcare centers were video recorded during morning drop-off and evening pick-up times. Fifty-eight videos were coded for eight dimensions of cocaring quality, representing observed support and undermining. Results indicated strong inter-rater reliability and associations amongst the individual dimensions consistent with theory, thus supporting initial construct validity. This study offers a new observational tool to assess cocaring relationships and provides practical information about the kinds of behaviors that convey support and undermining in everyday interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Young children's social and emotional competence is a key predictor of their current and future academic and social success. Although preschool teachers are critical socializing agent of children's social and emotional development, we know little about factors associated with preschool teachers' social and emotional responsiveness. Objective: This study examined how preschool teachers' educational training and regularity of receiving observational feedback were associated with teachers' social and emotional responsiveness, as mediated by more personal characteristics such as teachers' child-centered beliefs and motivation for professional development. Method: We investigated direct and indirect associations using a national survey of 1129 preschool teachers in the United States. Results: We found that teachers with an associate degree, compared to those without, were more likely to respond negatively to children's emotional displays. Taking child development or early education coursework was associated with less negative social guidance. Receiving regular observational feedback was associated with greater encouragement of expressing emotion and with less negative social guidance. We also found significant indirect associations. For example, teachers who received regular observational feedback had greater motivation for professional development, which in turn, predicted more positive social guidance and emotional responsiveness. Conclusions: More stringent educational criteria for preschool educators and ongoing observational feedback may support teachers' optimal social and emotional responsiveness. In addition, educational training should incorporate child-centered theory and practices and observational feedback should include information specific to professional development resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coparenting, or the ways partners relate to each other in their roles as parents, is important to child and family functioning. However, it remains unclear whether coparenting begins at or prior to a child's birth. This study tested whether expectant parents' behavior in the Prenatal Lausanne Trilogue Play procedure (PLTP), an assessment designed in Switzerland for examining prebirth coparenting behavior, forecasted postnatal observations of coparenting behavior in a sample of first-time parents in the United States. Participants were 182 dual-earner couples expecting their first child. Couples completed the PLTP in the third trimester of pregnancy and observations of coparenting behavior at 9-months postpartum. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated significant continuity between expectant parents' prenatal coparenting behavior and their observed postpartum coparenting behavior 1 year later. In particular, couples who engaged in higher quality prenatal coparenting behavior demonstrated more supportive and less undermining coparenting behavior at 9-months postpartum, even after controlling for observed prenatal couple behavior and self-reported couple relationship functioning. Thus, this study demonstrated the validity and utility of the PLTP as a window into the development of coparenting, and supported the notion that the coparenting relationship develops prior to the child's birth and is already distinct from the couple relationship.