Preschoolers' Reunion Responses in Day Care

Abstract

Although reunion responses are often used in studies of the effects of day care on parent-child relationships, little is known about the reliability of such behaviours in preschoolers. A fifteen-category Preschool Reunion Behavior Measure was developed to appraise the range of preschoolers' reunion responses in day care and their consistency across multiple observations. Twenty-two boys and girls were observed six times over a seven-week period during reunions with the same parent. Children showed the same type of reunion behaviour 50 percent of the time, which was significantly greater than chance expectation. Consistency in the general emotional tone of reunions was 72 percent. There were no differences in specific reunion behaviours - or in their consistency - between boys and girls, or when the mother or father was the retrieving parent. Taken together these findings indicate that preschoolers show a broad range of greeting behaviour, and the consistency of individual differences in reunion responses suggests that these behaviours may reflect some stable dimension of parent-child interaction.