This chapter outlines the roles of families and communities as well as the importance of early learning classrooms as they relate to integrating activities designed to promote children's development. Specific focuses of the chapter will delve into family dynamics, including various parenting styles and meta-emotion approaches, as they relate to affecting children's development. The chapter will also uncover the role of children's play interactions as they relate to how the activity itself fosters children's development as well as how play may be viewed as a vehicle in which to promote children's appreciation and understanding of diversity and multiculturalism. Specific program models typically seen within early learning classrooms and standards created by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) will be discussed in this chapter.

This chapter outlines the roles of families and communities as well as the importance of early learning classrooms as they relate to integrating activities designed to promote children's development. Specific focuses of the chapter will delve into family dynamics, including various parenting styles and meta-emotion approaches, as they relate to affecting children's development. The chapter will also uncover the role of children's play interactions as they relate to how the activity itself fosters children's development as well as how play may be viewed as a vehicle in which to promote children's appreciation and understanding of diversity and multiculturalism. Specific program models typically seen within early learning classrooms and standards created by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) will be discussed in this chapter.

This quantitative study investigated the concept of meta-emotion by examining factors that were associated with specific types of metaemotion approaches parents used. The main variables included parental stress, outside support, education levels. Other variables considered were number of children in the family, age of children, and children's gender. The concept of meta-emotion as well as the inclusion of these variables were important to investigate to further understand the factors that influenced parents' thoughts and reactions to their children's emotions and emotional responses. It was determined that 143 participants were needed. These participants were gathered by emails sent to students and faculty at Texas Woman's University. Participants were also gathered by dispersing flyers advertising the study in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas metroplex. Individuals who agreed to participate gave consent and then completed the anonymous online questionnaires through PsychData. Results yielded that parental stress was the only significant predictor of meta-emotion approaches.

This chapter outlines the roles of family, community, and early child education learning objectives as they relate to promoting diversity within early child education environments. Specifically, concepts such as parenting approaches, the ecological systems theory, early child education program models, and diversity are all discussed in this chapter. Early child education learning objectives such as those outlined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) are also applied as they relate to promoting children's developmental domains (social, emotional, cognitive, social) while further encouraging the integration of diversity and appreciation of everyone's cultures and backgrounds within early child education environments.