How Preschool Teachers Interpret and Respond to Competitive Play: Transformative and Compensatory Strategies

This study examines how preschool teachers interpret children’s emotional, behavioural, and interpersonal responses during competitive play and how these interpretations inform pedagogical action. Semi-structured interviews with twelve preschool teachers were analysed using codebook thematic analysis. Five interconnected themes were organised across three broader analytic domains: teachers’ interpretations of competitive situations, teacher-perceived child responses, and teachers’ pedagogical responses. These patterns were not treated as a fixed developmental sequence; rather, teachers’ accounts suggested that they were dynamically related and shaped by child-related and contextual influences, including sensitivity to competition, temperament, media exposure, parental attitudes, and classroom conditions. Teachers reported several transformative strategies, including emotional co-regulation, cognitive reframing, self-concept restoration, and structural regulation, alongside a less commonly reported compensatory strategy involving outcome alteration. Transformative strategies, such as emotional co-regulation and cognitive reframing, addressed children’s engagement with competitive experiences without altering the actual outcome, whereas compensatory strategies sought immediate emotional relief by modifying or re-presenting outcomes. This distinction reveals a central pedagogical and ethical tension between supporting children in processing competitive experiences and reducing distress by altering the outcome itself. Erikson’s initiative–guilt framework and Social Comparison Theory were used abductively to interpret teachers’ accounts of persistence, withdrawal, and peer comparison. Together, these perspectives illuminate how competitive play may make children’s initiatives socially visible and comparatively positioned. The study contributes a provisional interpretive framework of teacher decision-making and provides a basis for critical professional reflection and future observational and child-centred research.