Early childhood is the period sensitive to external stimulus, fast in absorbing and pursuing well-rounded personal development so that the leadership experience in this period gets its values. Children’s leadership is a positive factor for children ...
Early childhood is the period sensitive to external stimulus, fast in absorbing and pursuing well-rounded personal development so that the leadership experience in this period gets its values. Children’s leadership is a positive factor for children in leading and jugging circumstances surrounding themselves and others and contributing to achievement of common targets for their groups. Therefore, this study is to assess the level of children’s leadership by sub-factor of challenge and confidence, respect to others, self-behavior management and problem solving; and relationships among children’s leadership, temperament and emotional regulation capability so that this study would like to provide basic data for enhancement of children’s leadership.
The detailed sub-study themes are as follow;
1. How about the level of children’s leadership by sub-factor?
2. How about the relationships among children’s leadership, temperament
and emotional regulation capability?
Study subjects are 88 children at the age of 4 and 5 in 3 children’ educational institutes, locating in Seoul and Chungchung. For the concept of children’s leadership, the tool of the study by Jang, Yongsuk and Whang, Yun-sei (2009) is referred, in which the authors considered leadership as a potential capacity of all children which can be nurtured with interactions with surrounding environment. As for challenge and confidence among sub-factors, there is a criterion of ‘voluntary expression of their own opinion and idea’. The concept of children’s temperament is referred from a tool revised and rationalized by Lee, Gyungok (2004) by translating ‘Children's Behavior Questionnaire(CBQ)' of Rothbart(1996). The concept for children’s emotional regulation capability is referred from the test method developed by Zeman, Garber(1996) to measure emotional expression rules and adjusted and supplement by Lee, Hyeryun (2004).
This study calculates Cronbach's coefficient in use of PASW 20.0 to verify credibility of relationships among children’s leadership, temperament and emotional regulation capability; develops technical statistics to assess children’s leadership by sub-factor; and conducts a correlation analysis to understand the relationships of three items.
The summary of major findings is as follows;
First, the level of children’s leadership by sub-favor is little bit higher than the average while challenge and confidence among sub-factors is the highest, meaning that the children’s leadership has high level of confidence followed by respect to others, self-behavior management and problem solving.
Second, children’s leadership is irrelevant with temperament. The concept of leadership has evolved from personal capacity like authoritarian, top-down and temperament-oriented characters to that of democratic and vertical capacity.
Third, children’s leadership has high level of relevancy with emotional regulation capability.
These outcomes are attributable to perception evolvement of children’s leadership. In the arena for children’s leadership researches, more and more studies have started to focus on positive leaderships valuing democratic circumstance within a community and today’s leadership has developed into a virtue applicable to all people rather than exclusively to one individual. Therefore, children’s leadership might be realized in all children rather than specific ones. In addition, emotional regulation can be considered in line with leadership from the perspective of readjustment and change of their roles. Considering the fact that addition of sentimental factors to leadership increases the explanation power of it, it is important to make sensitive reaction to positive and negative sentiments in terms of explanation on children’s leadership. Therefore, not only emotional regulation capability but also sentimental sensitiveness should be included in studies on children’s leadership.