Speaker
Description
The aim of this study is to highlight the voice of the children and show how they experience peer rejection in ECECs by exploring their phenomenological expressions about how these experiences affect them emotionally. Based on the perspective that peer rejection is a characteristic of the peer group social norms, and it is characterized by thwarting the individual’s vital need to belong and be recognized, adopted from the theoretical approaches from The need-to-belong theory (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and Søndergaard’s social approach about mechanisms that culminate in bullying, the study explore the children’s expression’s of emotional stress in light of MacDonald & Leary (2005) term of social pain. The data were collected through video-recorded interviews with children between 3.5 and 6 years old and analysed within a phenomenological hermeneutical approach to examine the structures of their experiences. The findings reveal that the peer rejections are experienced as stressful and emotionally painful events, which affect the children’s emotional state and impact their social self-perception. Emotions such as anxiety, sadness, anger and hurt feelings seem to be responses to the rejection experiences, whereupon feeling unappreciated and inadequate are some of the self-perceptions that these devaluing events caused. These findings indicate that peer rejections do address a fundamental psychological condition: the deprivation of a sense of belonging and a relational devaluation, and must be prevented in the ECEC through a pedagogical practice promoting inclusion in children's free-play.
Keywords
Peer rejection, ECEC, need-to-belong, children’s emotions
| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Qualitative method study |
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| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
