September 3, 2025
In March 2025, Louise Hannan joined the Supporting Early Minds Team for a webinar on the emotional environment of Early Childhood and Care settings. Louise has been a Early Years Practitioner, Team Leader and Manager, in and around the Bristol area. She is now a lecturer at University Centre Somerset and this project was part of her on-going PhD with the Centre for Research and Early Childhood.
Early Childhood Education and Care settings have seen in recent times, unprecedented changes to policy, funding and requirements. Furthermore, post Covid-19, there has been a growing concern from a variety of settings about emotional, social and physical well-being of children. This project is an exploration into the emotional environment of Early Childhood Education and Care settings, examines the ecology of these complex interactions. Deploying a mix of phenomenology and praxeological methodologies, it considers the emotional ecology a unique phenomenon and aims to inform practice through direct observations in settings. It concludes by presenting a new way of considering the emotional ecology of settings by providing reflexive materials that settings can use to develop their thinking and practices.
Sharing her experiences in Early Years settings, Louise discussed the emotional environments offered to 2 year olds, how they experience them and how those can be improved. With humour, Louise described how 2 year olds can be ‘blenders with no lids’ and that they have not yet got the impulse control to understand goal-setting and delayed gratification. For 2 year olds, if they want something right now, they are going to do it. Early child is a key part of forming their emotions to help them evaluate these situations.
Louise described the process of emotional consciousness going through the neuroscience of emotional responses from sensory awareness, the role of the thalamus and amygdala in unconscious evaluation, the anterior cingulate and orbito frontal cortext in assessing and evaluating further cues and the ventero-lateral medial prefrontal areas to assess what everyone else is doing. Then the hippocampus allows us to assess whether this has happened before, moving forward to explicit memories which allow us to remember ‘I have down this before and …’.
Louise describes how this process allows us to choose behaviours from our history which got us success in the past. As we grow and develop, we have a growing bank of experiences to choose from. This links to how some children have sensation seeking behaviour where they perhaps enjoy jumping from things and enjoy it. Other children have been around fewer situations and may choose to avoid this risk. As they get older, they may choose to continue to avoid this risk.
There is a strong link between children’s emotions and their actions. These are linked and go back and forth like dominoes. In an Early Years setting, children can feel emotions and choose behaviours and then be told ‘Don’t do that’. Then they choose more emotions and behaviours and are never finished, they are always crossing over. In the early environment, there is the ability to share children’s behaviours and the way they feel about emotions.
This can be particularly poignant for children who grow up in environments where they need to fight and then they attend nursery or school where this is not allowed. They then feel shamed for behaviours which have kept them safe and alive so far.
Unfortunately, very little of this is part of the training for Early Years practitioners. There is very little opportunity for staff members to talk about this. Louise shared examples from her own practice of entering a room and being aware it would be a difficult day, of children who do not take to specific members of staff and of children whose personalities could shift the emotional environment positively or negatively.
Louise discussed the Poly Vagal theory around the link between heart, emotions, and nerves. The Poly vagus nerve connects the brain, facial muscles, heart, and gut. It relates to three possible states; social engagement, flight or fight, or freeze. Louise made an analogy of attending a large social event where one knows nobody and then locking eyes unexpectedly with a close friend across the room. One then switches from the flight, fight or freeze state to a calmed down state of social engagement. This is a premise that everyone works on and we need that eye to eye contact. There is a need for healthy relations.
Children feeling engaged with healthy relationships are more likely to learn, to engage, and to take risks. When we consider spaces that are created for children in the early years, we need to consider how they are engaged and whether they are on the periphery.
In her research, Louise found that:
A particular touching point was the ambiguity around love and affection in early childhood settings. The idea was that staff should be kind and friendly but not give excessive attention and to treat all children the same. Louise discussed how this could be a barrier to the way in which children attach. This relates to Dr Jools Page’s research on ‘professional love’ which investigates wariness in forming relationships with children in a professional setting.
Young children do not understand social rules, so they are seeking emotional connection but do not understand the professional barrier. Children may say ‘I love you’ to their key person or ask if they will come to their birthday party. They may give hugs and kisses, or squeeze the faces of their care giver. In her research, when she asked staff about their experiences of professional love, there was a strong link in responses around how such professional love would be perceived by the child’s family. There is a strong perception around how love belongs within a family setting.
Louise noticed a change in the emotional baselines of the early childhood settings based on the weather so that one setting was less harmonious when observed during a heatwave. She found that staff are emotional role models and mirrored responses were found within the emotional environment between adult and child. The role of love and connection in daycare is key. Staff are integral.
To round up, Louise shared her theory on early childhood education and care emotional ecology. She describes the ethics of care as a deeply reciprocal relationship between two people and is an ethical act. When we disengage, we marginalise children who are already marginalised. The children who struggle most in those environments are the ones who are most in need.
Early childhood settings are predicated on emotional labour. It cannot be done without emotional engagement. The children need the emotional connection. Co-regulation is also a key part and the adults have to be very emotionally aware. The adults have to manage situations that arise, for example if a child strikes them with an object, so that the adult’s emotions do not interfere with the child, leading to often high levels of emotional dissonance.
Relying on a paid carer raises concerns on forming authentic relationships. Doubts arise about the ability of a person from outside the family to truly love and care for a child. Louise pondered on what the parents’ expectations are and whether parents want staff to love their children. She shared an incident of a child who awoke from a nightmare in the night and asked for her key worker rather than her mother. Parents may feel jealous of key workers who are spending more time with their children and tensions arise.
An interesting point that Louise raised is that when parents are receiving orientation information when joining a nursery, they will be told key information about pick up and routines, but they will not be asked how they want staff to respond if their child says ‘I love you’. Some studies such as Bowlby reinforced the role of the mother in attachments but more recent advice has confirmed that children can have multiple attachments.
The emotional ecology of early childhood education and care settings are key to the growth and development of the children who attend them making research in this field a hugely important area for future investigation.