Abstract

For the early years of life, both home and child care environments are two principal microsystems where children's cognitive and social-emotional development occur (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Evans, 2010). Growing research documents that environmental chaos in these microsystems, characterized as high levels of crowding, ambient background noise, and a lack of routines as well as temporal and structural regularities, relates to poorer caregiving and less optimal developmental outcomes in children (Wachs, 2010). The few available cross-cultural research to date has yielded inconsistent results regarding the relations between environmental chaos and child outcomes in different cultures. This ongoing present study examines the role of both home and daycare chaos on preschoolers' social-emotional and cognitive skills. The sample consisted of 187 preschoolers, their mothers, and preschool teachers. Child age ranged from 40 to 83 months. Mothers completed questionnaires concerning home chaos, family routines, stressful events, parenting stress, and children's adjustment as well as temperament. Preschool teachers provided information on classroom chaos and children's social competence and behavior problems. Data on child executive function, emotion understanding, and receptive language skillswere obtained based on individual testing of children in daycare. Inital results documented a positive relation between mothers' perceptions of home chaos and their feelings of incompetency in caregiving as well as teacher ratings of child anger-aggreession at daycare. Findings will be discussed with respect to the buffering role of daycare environment as to whether the link between home chaos and poor social-emotional development would be attenuated for those children who experience low levels of child care chaos than those children who experience higher levels of child care chaos.