WHEN A CHILD’S EMOTIONAL COPING FAILS

The aim of this research is to increase understanding about children's emotional coping and to support teachers' work on enhancing children's readiness to handle challenging social situations at school. Emotional coping skills are important to human beings' success and wellbeing and the basis for these skills is built already in early childhood. In this research, various interactive learning activities were planned and carried out in the classroom and the measures of emotional coping were created. Nine pupils aged between seven and eight who had problems with their emotional coping were selected as the research participants. Their forms of emotional coping, development and teaching were observed and the pupils' self-evaluations were collected during the study year 2006-2007 in interactional classroom situations that involved mathematical problem-solving tasks. As a result, six various forms of emotional coping were found, which exemplified either constructivist, operational, or emotional coping. Results showed that pupils' individual emotional coping can be illustrated through various mathematical reasoning and problem-solving tasks in stages. Familiarizing oneself with the various forms of emotional coping contributes to the teacher's abilities to enhance students' emotional coping to survive and direct their emotions when the goal is to develop toward emotional directedness.