Distance Creates Distance: Preschool Staff Reflections and Experiences Concerning Preschool Introduction During the Covid-19-Pandemic

Recent attachment research attests that children’s relationships to preschool staff can contribute to their attachment development. The preschool introduction phase constitutes a natural arena for establishing these relationships, so organizing this introduction to enable relation-building between staff and children is essential. In Sweden, preschools stayed open during the covid-19-pandemic, however several social restrictions were implemented. The present study focuses on how these pandemic-related social restrictions have affected the prerequisites for facilitating good preschool staff-child interactions.
By analyzing open-ended survey data (N = 465), we explored how preschool staff experienced the pandemic restrictions during preschool introduction. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that while social distancing-restrictions accentuated the importance of engaging relationally with the families, physical distancing simultaneously constrained the parent-staff relationship-building. Importantly, the children seemed to interpret the parent-staff physical distance as relational distance, which negatively affected their emerging relationship to preschool staff. Our results also suggest that how parental participation is organized during preschool introduction may be critically important for child-staff attachment-related interactions, in a pandemic as well as a non-pandemic context. Finally, our results also highlight the significant contribution of preschool staff in supporting children’s coping with the crisis-related constraints during the important life-event of preschool transition.