Targeting Social Well-being to Improve Transitions to School

As one of the earliest major transitions in childhood, school-entry poses ample opportunities and risks for well-being and mental health.

A successful switch to school not only hinges on children´s individual cognitive skills, but also their social well-being, involving bonds within families and social networks. Yet, a consensus on core facets of social well-being is notably absent.

School-entry practices thus vary widely across Europe, calling for an empirically-based focus on socio-emotional development. To meet this pressing need, the SWITCH project will pursue the three following overarching research aims.

Step 1: We will recruit five large-scale representative samples at preschool-age across four European countries (Germany, Sweden, UK, Austria; n=~1.000 per site) to establish the unique cross-contextual contribution of social well-being to successful school-entry over and above other well-being dimensions and mental health, while considering demographic and age-related effects and other variations in school-entry within and between participating countries.

Step 2: In subsamples (n=80 per site), scoring high/low on social well-being in Step 1, we aim to disentangle biobehavioral mechanisms of social well-being in interplay with cognitive, early literacy and numeracy skills.

Specifically, we will conduct in-depth lab appointments 6 months before and after school-entry, with fine-grained assessments of key relationships (parents, peers, teachers) and interpersonal biobehavioral synchrony (child-parent, child-peer), among others.

We will prospectively examine the added value of social well-being (full sample) and its mechanisms (subsamples) for mental health, well-being, early literacy and numeracy skills at the end of 1st grade.

Step 3: Based on our Step 1 and 2 results, we will develop and disseminate guidelines to policymakers and stakeholders detailing strategies for attending to and fostering (social) well-being amid this major transition in children’s lives.