Introduction: Supporting children’s social and emotional development in the early years has lasting benefits for their mental health and wellbeing. Early education settings play a critical role in providing this support. This is especially true in rural and regional Australia, where the unique context impacts mental health service access as well as outcomes. Universal, preventative mental health approaches are a valuable way to address these challenges, and the early years provide an ideal opportunity for implementation. One promising approach gaining recognition for its role in fostering children’s emotional development is caregiver co-regulation. An intervention trial is currently underway in North East Victoria exploring the impact of Tuning in to Kids, an evidence-based emotion socialisation program, on educators’ co-regulation skills in kindergarten settings. This presentation will report on preliminary findings from the trial, examining factors that influence educator co-regulation as a central process in early childhood emotion socialisation.
Method: This study will utilise baseline data from the larger randomised controlled trial involving 30 rural early education services and over 150 educators. Services were randomly allocated to an intervention group (2025) or a waitlist-control group (2026). In January 2025, educators in the intervention group completed face-to-face training in emotion coaching, with a focus on their own emotion regulation and supportive responses to children’s emotions. Baseline data was collected via online surveys and included demographic information and measures of educator self-efficacy for co-regulation, wellbeing, emotion competence, and perceptions of workplace climate.
Outcomes: Preliminary findings will be presented, highlighting associations between educator self-efficacy for co-regulation and key individual and organisational factors. These insights contribute to a clearer conceptualisation of co-regulation in early education and provide a foundation for evaluating interventions aimed at building co-regulation capacity as a pathway to improved mental health outcomes for rural Australian children.