Unique and joint contributions of behavioral and emotional self-regulation to school readiness

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the unique and joint contributions of behavioral and emotional self-regulation to key but understudied emergent literacy and early social skills, disentangling sex-differentiated paths. The participants were 231 Portuguese preschoolers (50% boys; M_age = 59.5 months; SD = 8.5) enrolled in 47 classrooms. In the first assessment wave, the children’s behavioral self-regulation and receptive vocabulary were individually assessed. The teachers reported on children’s emotional self-regulation. In the second assessment wave, individual assessments on children’s expressive vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, oral-narrative production, and social problem-solving skills were conducted. The results showed that the children’s emergent literacy and early social skills were more related to their behavioral self-regulation than to their emotional self-regulation. Child sex moderated the links between behavioral self-regulation and oral-narrative production skills and the link between emotional self-regulation and early social skills. These findings may have important implications for planning early interventions for developing self-regulation skills.

Data availability statement

The data supporting the findings of this study may be obtained from the corresponding author (J. Cadima) upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FCT under Grants SFRH/BD/138821/2018 and PTDC/MHC-CED/5218/2012, and by the Center for Psychology at the University of Porto, Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT UIDB/00050/2020).