Preschool peer interactions and readiness to learn: Relationships between classroom peer play and learning behaviors and conduct.

Abstract

Promoting young children's readiness to learn is a national priority. This mandate is clearly stated within the first of our National Education Goals, which reads that all American children will start school ready to learn by the year 2000 (U.S. Department of Education, 1992). Unfortunately, many young children in America are facing increasingly stressful and ?socially toxic? environments that threaten the development of competencies necessary for early school success (Garbarino, 1995). Approximately one in five American children currently lives in poverty (Children's Defense Fund, 1998) and is exposed to multiple risk factors—including poor health care, lack of appropriate housing, family stress, and community violence—that severely threaten their development (Huston, McLoyd, & Garcia Coll, 1994).