Social-emotional skills are an integral part of children’s development. These skills enable children to interact well with others, operate as part of a group, persist in tasks, try new approaches and cope with setbacks. Social-emotional skills are learned, through the interactions and other experiences a child has with his or her family, with other adults and other children. And while curiosity is innate in new-borns and toddlers, a child’s level of curiosity can be enhanced or diminished in their home and other early learning environments.
Early social-emotional development is strongly linked with children’s progress in cognitive domains such as emergent literacy and emergent numeracy. In emergent literacy, the social-emotional skills most strongly associated with disadvantaged children’s learning are curiosity, empathy and sociability (Figure 8.1). Levels of sociability and trust appear to be more important for disadvantaged children in comparison to advantaged children. Non-disruptive behaviour 1 has the weakest association with emergent literacy for both groups of children.