Teachers’ relationships with children can serve as a model for other classroom relationships (Curby, Brock, & Hamre, 2013), and, in particular, for the development of social skills. Previous research has also provided support for the relationship between higher levels of maternal sensitivity and the development of subsequent social skills (e.g., Mintz, Hamre, & Hatfield, 2011). However, there is little consistent data on how the quality of teacher-child interactions affects the relationship between family context (e.g., maternal sensitivity) and children’s social skils in the preschool context. Within this framework, we aim to test the moderating effect of the quality of teacher-child interactions on the relationship between maternal sensitivity and social skills, when controlling for children’s individual characteristics (i.e., temperament, verbal ability, sex, age). To this purpose, 30 randomly selected preschool classrooms and teachers (Area of Lisbon), 180 typically developing preschoolers (six randomly selected children, three boys and three girls, aged 4 to 6 years, in each classroom), and 180 mothers (of the randomly selected children) participated in this study. The following procedures were adopted: (a) assessment of maternal sensitivity with the Three Boxes Task (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1999); (b) observation of classroom quality with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008); (c) assessment of temperament with the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006); (d) assessment of verbal ability with the Portuguese version of Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence – Revised (Wechsler, 2003); and (e) assessment of social skills with the Social Skills Rating System (Gresham & Elliott, 2007) for teachers. Multilevel analysis will be conducted and associations between variables presented. We expect to contribute to the knowledge of factors predicting social skills in preschool-aged children, identifying potential promoting or compensatory effects of the quality of teacher-child interactions.

--