Dissonance in Interactions with Parents: A Qualitative Study on Vulnerability and Trust and Implications for the Professional Development of Early Childhood Educators

Abstract

The expectation of establishing an educational partnership with parents poses challenges for both parents and early childhood educators (ECEs). Structural conditions and diverging orientations often complicate cooperation between educators and parents. This exploratory qualitative interview study with 15 ECEs examines which situations in their interaction with parents they find challenging. Based on qualitative content analysis, tense situations in interactions with parents are interpreted through the lenses of vulnerability and dissonance theory. The results show that ECEs experience different dissonances, vulnerabilities, and varying forms of trust in their work with parents. While experienced ECEs report role-related tensions (dissonances), younger ECEs describe relational strains with parents. The findings highlight profession-specific challenges that are discussed in terms of their implications for ECEs’ (further) professional development.

1. Introduction

When it comes to the quality of early childhood education, international research considers various aspects of quality. Studies show that the framework conditions of organisational quality (e.g., management), orientation quality (e.g., professional attitude) and structural quality (e.g., staff–child ratio, qualifications) have an impact on process quality (Viernickel, 2022). While process quality was long primarily related to the quality of interactions between early childhood educators (hereafter ECEs) and children, the interaction between ECEs and parents has recently been integrated into the expanded structure–process model as a characteristic of process quality (Anders & Oppermann, 2024)—also as an empirically grounded response to the normative call to establish so-called education and care partnerships between ECEs and parents (hereafter educational partnership; Textor & Blank, 2004). The expanded structure–process model takes into account empirical findings showing that cooperation between parents and ECEs is meaningful both for parental involvement and for child development (Fröhlich-Gildhoff, 2013; Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, 1995; Hummel & Anders, 2022; Kantova, 2024). The importance of mutual understanding and communication for the cooperation between ECE and parents is also emphasised by the theory of overlapping spheres (Epstein, 2019), a framework that focuses on the partnership between communities and, above all, educational institutions and families, that can be applied to early years education. Among other things, it highlights communication as a key factor in parental involvement. This perspective complements the expanded structure–process model, as it makes it clear that a supportive professional framework (structure) must include effective communication strategies (process) in order to foster a partnership between educational institutions and families that promotes children’s learning and development. The meaning of communication has complements findings indicating the importance of ‘consistent attitudes and views … regarding the importance of cooperation’ of ECE and parents (Hummel & Anders, 2022, p. 138). Accordingly, ECEs and parents should share not only ideas about the child’s development, upbringing, education and care, but also about building and maintaining a trusting relationship (Hummel et al., 2022a, 2022b; Matthiesen et al., 2022) acknowledging each partner as important and powerful in children’s daily life. Various studies show that the form and quality of the interaction of home and professionals is not only significant for the child and its development and its parents, but also has an impact on ECEs. Consequently, a positive relationship with parents and their ability to regulate emotions are important for the job satisfaction of ECEs (Jeon & Ardeleanu, 2020; Tatalović Vorkapić & Velan, 2023).

However, communicating and establishing successful professional relationships with parents is often challenging for ECEs (Carrasco, 2019; Fröhlich-Gildhoff, 2013; Viernickel & Weßels, 2020). Not only are there contradictory demands, conflicting goals and complicating structural conditions in concrete interactions. Furthermore, it is by no means a given that parents and ECEs share the same orientations and views, or that they can communicate them or even reconcile them with one another. In their efforts to establish an educational partnership with parents, ECEs are dependent on the willingness and ability of parents to get involved (Betz et al., 2019, p. 245). Parents vary in their willingness or ability to contribute to positive relations with ECEs, e.g., due to their availability, their interest in educational issues, language barriers, or cultural background. Similarly, parents’ ideas about educational goals and styles may differ from those of ECEs. In the professional fulfilment of their tasks, ECEs may therefore experience tensions between normative ideas about educational partnerships and their assessment of actual interactions with parents due to potentially conflicting orientations between parents and themselves.

Although early education and care (hereafter ECEC) quality, especially process quality, can be seen as a significant predictor for child outcomes (Howard et al., 2024; Miller & Movahedazarhouligh, 2026), ECEs can hardly challenge children’s family influences (Holl et al., 2020; NICHD ECCRN, 2003). Due to the families’ persistent influence on child outcomes, educational partnerships between ECE and parents are widely promoted as a key component of high-quality early childhood education, empirical research and theory reveals substantial challenges in their implementation (Betz, 2015). Conflicting expectations, structural barriers, and differing educational philosophies often create tensions that ECEs must navigate in their daily work (Betz et al., 2019; Carrasco, 2019). This raises the question of how ECEs experience these challenges, and which factors facilitate or hinder successful cooperation with parents. Based on dissonance theory (Festinger, 1978), we assume that ECEs experience conflicts between the ideal of partnership and real-world constraints in their interaction with parents. Drawing on qualitative interviews with ECEs in Berlin [Germany], this study explores their perspectives on how they perceive interactions with parents in practice.

Interaction Between Early Childhood Education Professionals and Parents—A Dissonance Theory Perspective

In the current research literature, there are various terms used to describe the relationship between ECEs or institutions and parents. These differ in terms of whether they describe the form of the relationship (e.g., network; Kluczniok & Roßbach, 2014), aim to support and involve parents in the upbringing of their children (e.g., parental involvement), or focus more on the quality of the relationship (e.g., partnership; Garvis et al., 2022; Hummel et al., 2022a, 2022b). There is agreement that shaping the quality of this relationship is part of the professional duties of ECEs. Professional practices such as parenting, opportunities for cooperation and the actual involvement of parents, as well as regular communication on the part of ECEs, have a supportive effect in this regard (Hummel et al., 2022a, 2022b). Particularly, respectful and appreciative interaction and the constructive resolution of conflicts promote relational trust between ECEs and parents (Hummel & Anders, 2022; Hummel et al., 2022a, 2022b; Kikas et al., 2011).

However, establishing a constructive relationship between ECEs and parents is considered a challenge (Garvis et al., 2022; OECD, 2024). This is because there are often differing expectations of each other, differing views on child development and its promotion, or differing ideas about educational goals and styles. Furthermore, asymmetries can strain the relationship between ECEs and parents (for example, in socio-economic terms—in relation to parents with a weak socio-economic background; Hummel et al., 2022b; Mahmood, 2013; McGrath, 2007). Recent empirical studies suggest that professional exhaustion and dissatisfaction on the part of ECEs is linked to their perception of their interaction with parents (Trauernicht et al., 2023, 2024).

If professional success, the successful completion of tasks, their own health and the performance of the professional role (also) depend on parents over whom ECEs have little influence, the requirement to implement the normative program of education and parenting partnerships can pose considerable challenges for ECEs. From a theoretical perspective, the tensions between normative expectations and the perceived difficulty of realizing them can lead to so-called cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1978). Such cognitive dissonance can occur when two conflicting cognitions arise simultaneously—such as the desire or duty to comply with a norm or expectation, and the experience that this is difficult, and goals are hard to achieve. Dissonance violates a fundamental psychological need and is experienced as unpleasant tension, or a potential source of discomfort or lack of well-being (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Gawronski, 2012). Therefore, people strive to resolve conflicting cognitions; this can be done, for example, by avoiding uncomfortable situations, changing beliefs or rationalizing.

Trust could open an alternative path to deal with dissonance—one that consciously allows for vulnerability (Rousseau et al., 1998), which can be caused by experiences of dissonance. Those who trust accept temporary inconsistencies as part of a process, rather than experiencing dissonances as a threat to their well-being. Nevertheless, the role of trust, which is seen as a social mechanism for reducing complexity (Lewicki et al., 1998; Luhmann, 2014), in dealing with dissonance remains unclear. Especially in conflictual or challenging situations, trust could act as a buffer that mitigates the aversive experiential quality of dissonance (with regard to burn-out Van Maele & Van Houtte, 2015) because contradictions are temporarily accepted in order to reduce complexity; this may be linked to the level of expertise. Vulnerability may be suspected where unresolved conflicts over norms encounter gaps in trust (which may interact with the level of expertise); furthermore, professional identity is also likely to depend on recognition as ‘professional’. To understand the role of trust and vulnerability in coping with dissonance, it seems promising to explore the different experiences of dissonance and relate them to trust (Bormann et al., 2025b).

Assuming that normative professional expectations concerning the involvement of and partnership with parents (educational partnership) may at times conflict with actual interactions with parents, it can be assumed that this conflict may give rise to a sense of dissonance; however, this is not purely individual in nature, but is also structural/institutional and characterised by power asymmetries. However, little is currently known about in what respects ECEs perceive relationships with parents as tense, how ECEs cope with such perceived dissonance, and what role trust plays in this interaction. Unlike in the context of teacher research, the dissonance theory perspective has so far been little used in research on ECEs. While Festinger’s theory originally analyses individual decision-making processes, we assume that it can also be applied to professional role conflicts—like studies on primary and secondary school teachers (Delaney, 2015). Exploring which situations in the interaction with parents ECEs perceive as dissonance can be insightful: It provides starting points for the (further) development of professional knowledge and action—for example, in training, continuing education and further training events or supervision sessions, in which (self-)reflection and targeted support services help to clarify contradictory experiences and develop options for dealing with them.

Regarding the hitherto little-studied subjectively perceived experience of dissonance among early childhood education ECEs in their interactions with parents, this qualitative exploratory study investigates the following research questions:

(1)

In which situations in their interaction with parents do early childhood educators describe dissonance?

(2)

How do early childhood educators differ in terms of their experience of dissonance?

Empirically based answers to these questions provide deeper insights into the challenges and stresses perceived by ECEs in their professional practice.

2. Materials and Methods

For the study, 15 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with ECEs from various early childhood education institutions in Berlin [Germany] in winter 2022/23. The facilities are located in districts of Berlin that differ in terms of socio-economic status or the proportion of people from migrant backgrounds. In this exploratory study, the focus is on the general attitudes of professionals towards parents; therefore, no systematic sampling was carried out according to a sampling plan. In order to recruit interviewees, the heads of various early years education centers were contacted, and they shared information about the study with their teams. As a result, the ECEs proactively came forward to volunteer to take part in the interviews.

Narrative-generating questions aimed to elicit descriptions of subjectively significant experiences and encounters with parents from ECEs. Targeted follow-up questions prompted respondents to reflect on the causes of their perceived change in their relationship with parents (cf. Supplement S1). At the end of the interview, the participants were asked—along with some demographic data—to indicate their level of interpersonal trust on a five-point scale, where 1 stands for ‘low’ and 5 for ‘high’ (KUSIV3; Beierlein et al., 2012).

The interviews were transcribed according to simplified rules (Dresing & Pehl, 2018) and analysed qualitatively using content analysis with the MAXQDA software, version MAXQDA24 26.0.0, using a deductively and inductively generated category system (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2022). The deductive main code ‘Situations of interaction with parents’ was supplemented by inductively derived subcodes, which allowed the situations described to be differentiated. In addition, a case summary was generated for each individual interview using the ‘AI Assist > Summarise document’ function available in MAXQDA with the prompt ‘Summarise the interview (medium length summary)’. The summaries generated in this way were carefully verified by the authors by checking the consistency of the summaries’ content against the codings assigned to key codes.

All the ECEs interviewed are female. They are between 23 and 59 years old (mean age 36). At the time of the interview, they had been working as ECEs for between two and 40 years (mean 15.3 years). The interviews were conducted at locations suggested by the ECEs; mostly quiet side rooms in the facility where they work. The interviews lasted between 45 and 90 min.

In accordance with the regulations of the authors’ institutions, the ethics committee was not involved because the participants are adults who participated voluntarily; furthermore, they did not belong to a particularly vulnerable group, and the study did not affect any personal rights. The interview partners were comprehensively informed about the study and the protection and analysis of their data. Participants were informed that they could withdraw their consent to the use of the interview at any time without giving reasons and without suffering any disadvantages of any kind. All ECEs signed a consent form to participate in the study. The original audio files of the interviews were deleted immediately after a quality check on the transcripts.

3. Results

The qualitative content analysis of the semi-structured interviews led to the following results, which are presented along the two questions.

3.1. In Which Situations in Their Interaction with Parents Do Early Childhood Educators Describe Dissonance?

The ECEs interviewed repeatedly reported four (sometimes interrelated) situations of interaction with parents that can be interpreted as indications of cognitive dissonance.

Firstly, these are situations that involve parents ‘adhering to agreements’, as illustrated by this example quote:

If parents don’t stick to agreements, I can’t do my job. And if I’m always talking to a brick wall, we won’t get anywhere.

(SE-PFK: 55)

Comments of this kind indicate that parents’ cooperation is problematic for ECEs in performing their role in compliance with standards. This expresses the dissonance between the ECEs dependence on parental cooperation and their refusal to cooperate. As the ECEs point out, this is sometimes accompanied by dishonesty on the part of parents (e.g., regarding whether their child has any signs of illness when they bring them to the childcare center), their failure to comply with agreements (e.g., in relation to bringing or picking up their child late from the ECEC) or the fact that ECEs feel that parents do not recognize their professional competence.

Secondly, there are reports of situations in which ECEs feel that parents interfere with their professional ‘task fulfilment’. This is illustrated by the following interview excerpt:

Here at our childcare center, it’s sometimes difficult because of language barriers. For many families, we simply need interpreters or must ask other family members if they can translate. (…) That definitely makes it very difficult. Otherwise, they are often very distant. Which is a shame, because you don’t really know the families well enough to be able to understand the children’s structures and behaviours.

(GE-PFK: 5)

The dissonance addressed in quotes of this kind is that ECEs are expected to build relationships with parents and want to do so but are hardly able to. The reasons given by the ECEs range from the difficulty of overcoming language barriers, to their perception that they must prove their professional competence in dealing with children to the parents, to the challenge of fulfilling their duty to address any suspicions of inappropriate behaviour on the part of parents (e.g., if there are concerns about the child’s welfare at home).

Thirdly, ECEs describe situations relating to the children ‘getting to know each other and settling in’. These are generally described in positive terms; challenges are described in relation to the parents:

With some parents, I had the feeling that they were, well, very apprehensive about leaving their child somewhere. That they were afraid for their child. That they were not yet ready to give us the benefit of the doubt, so to speak.

(TA-PFK: 7)

Interview segments assigned to this code that provide information about challenges illustrate difficulties in relation to trust between parents and ECEs. ECEs describe how they not only have to take competent care of the children, but also of the parents, whose behaviour during the settling-in and getting-to-know-you phase they sometimes describe as disrespectful or disparaging (e.g., when parents believe that the ECEs are not paying enough exclusive attention to their own child).

The fourth group of situations relates to ‘illnesses’, as illustrated by the following example:

No matter how often we explain, no matter how we point out the importance of considering others, that others will not become infected or that we ourselves will become infected, then we will be absent and then there will be emergency care, or the childcare center will be closed. This still doesn’t work from year to year, and that’s the factor that repeatedly leads to frustration, yes, towards the parents.

(KA-PFK: 27)

These situations are reported by the ECEs only sporadically, but in detail. Nevertheless, they illustrate the dissonant relationship between ECEs and parents regarding their own interests. By disregarding the expectation that they should not bring their sick children to the facility, parents pose a risk of infection to ECEs and other children. This situation can be interpreted as an indication of tension between the value of work: parents must work even when their own child is sick—ECEs want to stay healthy so that they can enable all other parents to do the same (e.g., parents who knowingly bring their child to nursery when they are ill accept that ECEs and other children may become infected, just so that they themselves can work).

The interviews make clear that ECEs repeatedly and often describe in detail the extent to which they experience dissonance regarding parental perception and recognition of their competence. Some ECEs experience their competence as problematic in the sense that it is not yet sufficient but could be improved; others indicate that they experience their own professional competence as a buffer in coping with challenging situations.

This raises the question of the extent to which early childhood education ECEs differ in their descriptions of experiences of dissonance.

3.2. How Do Early Childhood Educators Differ in Terms of Their Experience of Dissonance?

To answer this question, the case summaries generated by AI were interpreted by one of the authors with regard to the extent to which the interviewees made statements suggesting their experienced dissonance, i.e., the discrepancy between ECE’s expectations of and experiences with parents. This evaluative content analysis made it possible to classify the small sample into two groups of interviewees: one group that seems to experience dissonance more in terms of how they are perceived by parents concerning their professional role as an ECE (eight people), and one group that seems to experience dissonance more in terms of their relationship with parents (seven people). Respondents from both groups reported on all four situations mentioned above. The consistency of this classification was verified scrutinizing case-specific codings concerning the ‘reasons for vulnerability’ they mentioned.

Members of the relationship-focused group are between 23 and 37 years old and experience the challenging situations described in different ways, i.e., as stressful, neutral or positive. They describe the non-compliance with agreements as particularly problematic. The role-focused group also includes older ECEs up to the age of 59. They describe negative experiences in situations involving getting to know children and children falling ill. The demands of parents or their dishonesty is challenging for members of both groups; these are described as stressful above all by ECEs from the role-focused group. Members of the relationship-focused group are more likely to describe feeling that parents do not perceive them as adequately competent in their professional role.

The ECEs in these two groups also differ in their ideas about trust. ECEs from the relationship-focused group (younger ECEs with slightly lower interpersonal trust, averaging 3.6 on the KUSIV3 scale) tend to articulate trust as something emotional that takes time to develop, requires letting go, and can easily be damaged by dishonesty. The following two quotes illustrate this point:

I would say it’s more of an emotional thing. So, if I somehow notice that there is, for example, a lack of reliability. Or if I somehow feel that what is being said is not entirely sincere. Yes, a little bit. I find it difficult to describe. I must be honest. Because for me it’s more of a feeling thing

(DA-PFK: 49)

Well, I associate it with a feeling of security somehow. And of well-being. Just being able to be myself, honestly

(BA-PFK: 61)

The ECEs from the role-focused group (older ECEs with slightly stronger interpersonal trust, averaging 4.4 on the KUSIV3 scale) describe trust as something that enables them to act professionally and is based on keeping agreements and open, reliable and honest communication:

My understanding of trust (…4 s) is (…4 s) when, for example, you can rely on something that has been agreed upon. (10 s) Yes, … And when you can say anything in any case. And that it’s not always interpreted negatively

(GE-PFK: 49)

Oh dear, trust. Well, yes, that when someone says something, they actually do it, that you’re not being lied to, that someone is telling the truth. Trust. That you don’t have to be afraid that they’ll be nice to your face and then think or do something else, something bad, behind your back. So, the most important thing for me is that what you say is true, that it is reflected in your actions, but that it is also your opinion

(HA-PFK: 49)

Table 1 summarises the results of the exploratory study.

Table 1. ECEs experience and deal with dissonance differently.

Dissonant Interaction Situations with Parents Through the Lens of ECEs: Parents’ Adhering to Agreements, ECEs’ Task Fulfilment, Getting to Know Each Other and Settling in, Illnesses of Children
younger ECEs (between 23 and 37 years)	older ECEs (up to 59 years)
relationship focus in their interaction with parents	professional role focus in their interaction with parents
parental non-compliance with agreements particularly problematic	getting to know each other and illnesses particularly problematic
vulnerable in terms of perception and respect of parents	vulnerable in terms of communication of parents
lower interpersonal trust compared to older ECEs	higher interpersonal trust compared to younger ECEs
trust as something emotional to be built over time, easily damaged by dishonesty	trust as a precondition for professional acting, relying on openness, reliability and honesty

4. Discussion

In recent years, educational partnerships have evolved from a normative idea to a ‘programmatic quality goal for (early childhood) educational practice’ (Betz & Bollig, 2023, p. 201). Within this context, cooperation between ECEs and parents has increasingly become the focus of empirical studies in early childhood education research (Betz, 2015; Hummel et al., 2022b; Kambouri et al., 2022; Ward, 2018; Ward & Perry, 2020). Although studies on ECEs’ stress and job satisfaction exist (Viernickel & Weßels, 2020), no studies have yet been conducted specifically with regard to the extent to which ECEs perceive the interactions with parents as challenging and dissonant. This is where the present exploratory study contributes. By focusing on communication as a key form of parental involvement (Epstein, 2019), this study provides initial insights into ECEs’ perspectives on the challenges of interacting with parents, the impact this has on their professional well-being, and the resulting potential opportunities for supporting them and furthering their professional development. This study thus also aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the ‘parental involvement’ component of the expanded structure–process model (Anders & Oppermann, 2024).

In line with other research (Ward, 2018; Hummel & Anders, 2022, Hummel et al., 2022a, 2022b; Kikas et al., 2011; Epstein, 2019), the results of this qualitative interview study show that communication, relationship building with parents, and shared values are important to the ECEs surveyed. The present study shows that the recognition of their professionalism by parents and mutual respect play a significant role. The findings further illustrate that ECEs sometimes doubt their own professional integrity and question the appropriateness of their actions, especially in difficult interactions with parents. These results are consistent with Cloos (2008), who showed that ECEs’ biographical experiences guide their pedagogical actions more strongly than academic knowledge. According to those findings, different individual experiences can coexist without any of them being considered more reliable than another. Academic knowledge as a basis for decision-making and action, grounded in empirical or theoretical facts, might therefore be less questionable, and can thus be less challenging. ECEs perceive their professional actions as particularly challenging when their own professional standards, expectations, and actions do not align with those of the parents. In this study, such experiences are interpreted as indications of unpleasant dissonances regarding ECEs’ understanding of their professional role. However, further studies are needed to empirically substantiate this preliminary proposition drawn from the present research. Dissonance between normative expectations and the evaluation of one’s own professional interactions can also be understood as a sign of the situational vulnerability of ECEs. Following Festinger (1978), the conflict of beliefs and actions motivates stress and discomfort. It can be assumed that such unease is associated with vulnerability in demanding situations and interactions. According to Mackenzie et al. (2014), situational vulnerability is context-specific and is essentially determined by personal, social, or economic conditions. All three dimensions—personal, social, and economic—shape the interaction between ECEs and parents. On a personal level, dealing with challenging parents can be stressful for ECEs. Social and economic conditions may also be considered as there is an imbalance of power, as ECEs, e.g., often put their health at risk in their work—for example when caring for sick children—and, additionally, they often do not earn very much.

According to the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1978), people strive to resolve such dissonances, for example through rationalization. The results of the study can be interpreted to mean that ECEs do indeed rationalize the dissonance they perceive, namely by blaming parents for the load and tensions they experience in challenging interactions. ECEs achieve this in different ways. As has been shown, the ECEs interviewed in this study can be divided into two groups: a group of younger ECEs who express dissonance regarding their relationship with parents, and a group of older ECEs who talk about dissonance in relation to their professional role. The former (relationship focus) seem to feel particularly vulnerable in terms of how they are perceived and respected by parents; the latter (role focus) are particularly concerned about parents’ dishonesty and difficult communication with them, which makes it difficult for ECEs to perform their duties. Looking at further results of the study, it also seems likely that general interpersonal trust could ‘buffer’ the dissonance perceived by ECEs. While the group of younger ECEs, who have a relationship focus in their interactions with parents, report lower general interpersonal trust, the group of more experienced ECEs, who focus on their role in their interactions with parents, report higher general interpersonal trust. In line with their ‘relationship focus’, younger ECEs understand trust as something emotional, while those ECEs who are ‘role focused’ understand it as something functional for the exercise of their profession. Against this background, it can be argued that higher interpersonal trust enables a stronger focus on the professional role rather than on the emotional relationship. This assumption is supported by the fact that trust is not seen as a stable personality trait, but as a dynamic, experience-based attitude (Lewis & Weigert, 1985; Schweer, 2022; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960). Conversely, lower interpersonal trust makes people more susceptible to disappointment (according to Bollnow, 1959), which in turn can have a negative impact on a positive professional self-concept. This assumption is plausible insofar as younger ECEs have less professional experience in dealing with parents (or have had less opportunity to do so). Together with their lower level of interpersonal trust, they are therefore more vulnerable on a personal level than in their professional role. In other words, their formal professional role as ‘ECE’ cannot yet serve as a ’protective shield’ for their subjective personality but is still in development. Interactions in which ECEs experience themselves as vulnerable in terms of values or interests for various reasons, or experience the interactions with parents as dissonant, can be understood as indications that professional competencies in the sense of self-reflective further development should be further expanded.

Since perceived discrepancies between expectations and requirements activate cognitive strategies to reduce such dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019), explicitly addressing and working through dissonance can be an opportunity to learn (from others) how to act professionally in a given situation and to develop or further develop a professional self-concept. As recent studies show, the development of one’s own professional role and competencies is not achieved through vocational training alone (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025). According to recent studies, how early childhood interactions are experienced, what orientations develop from them and how these are implemented are, among other things, an expression of the biographical experiences of ECEs (Voss, 2025). On the one hand, professional experience—in potentially more or less informal interactions—or further training is (only) understood as part of professionalisation in everyday working life; personal experience, on the other hand, emerges as an important criterion for action in early childhood education practice (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025; Fröhlich-Gildhoff et al., 2011; Oberhuemer, 2016; Resa et al., 2017). In many cases, ECEs not only consider their experiences to be more important for their actions than academic knowledge, but also reflect less on them (Cloos, 2008; Rothe, 2019). The importance of professional exchange about challenging interactions should therefore not be underestimated for quality development in early childhood education (Slot & Nata, 2019). In parent–ECE professional interactions in particular, emotions shape both affective responses (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) and cognitive dissonance (Elliot & Devine, 1994), meaning that stressful situations can directly impact job performance (Trauernicht et al., 2023, 2024; Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996)—and thus process quality in ECEC (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025). Since affective responses are culturally learned (Reckwitz, 2021) and reflect how individuals subjectively interpret situations, their accumulation over time may crystallize into orientations that shape cognitive decision-making in pedagogical practice (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025; Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). Overall, the results show that young and experienced ECEs experience and cope with dissonance differently. This provides concrete pointers for training and further education: in addition to technical skills, opportunities for reflection on biographical experiences and their influence on professional self-image must be created.

4.1. Implications

The results obtained in this exploratory study show the different experiences of dissonance among younger and older ECEs and the potentially buffering effect of the extent of their interpersonal trust. If the findings reported here can be corroborated in larger-scale studies, the results may be regarded as early indications for the training and professional development of ECEs. The results may suggest considering ECE’s biographical and professional experiences and their reflection on them. Such reflection can be stimulated at the level of cognitive, metacognitive and epistemic knowledge (Kitchener, 1983): while cognitive knowledge refers, among other things, to the perception and processing of challenges, metacognitive knowledge encompasses one’s own progress in overcoming such challenges; epistemic knowledge influences how problems are perceived and which strategies are considered suitable solutions. In adulthood, particularly epistemic knowledge is highly developable, and epistemic attitudes are related to the quality of interactions and competence development (Anders, 2012). These orientations develop and consolidate over the lifespan (ibid.), shaped by ECE professionals’ biographical experiences, and may thus serve as a potential mediator between biographical experience and process quality (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025). However, focusing exclusively on the competencies of ECEs would be too one-sided. In further professionalisation concepts, it therefore seems sensible to take greater account of the personal challenges experiences of ECEs, for example by creating and reflecting on learning opportunities for ECEs based on individually challenging interactions in practice (Nentwig-Gesemann, 2017) to be able to act in a high-quality manner in pedagogical interactions.

4.2. Limitations and Future Directions

Like any empirical study, this study also has weaknesses that need to be addressed. Firstly, the sample consists exclusively of female respondents. Although most ECEs are female in general, it would be interesting to find out whether and to what extent male ECEs have a different view of interaction with parents. In practice, gender-mixed teams could potentially benefit from the exchange of perspectives and, if necessary, the de-escalation of interactions that are considered problematic. Secondly, the results of the present study indicate a difference between experienced and less experienced ECEs. However, it remains unclear whether less experienced ECEs develop similar patterns of perception to the more experienced ECEs surveyed in this study as they gain professional experience. This would require a longitudinal study. It must also be noted that the study assumes that ECEs wish to adhere to the norm of educational partnership; ECEs’ attitudes toward this norm should be explicitly surveyed in future studies. Furthermore, future studies should examine a larger sample of ECEs to determine the extent to which the dissonant interaction situations found here can be confirmed, and explicitly ask ECEs about their perceived vulnerability. Last but not least, prospective studies could involve parents as participants. Parents’ perspectives on their trust in ECEs and their relationship with them would provide deeper insights into why parents and ECEs may have differing expectations and interpretations regarding their partnership, and would thus contribute to a better understanding of the challenges of this educational partnership. Particularly, dyadic designs involving both ECEs and parents could help to identify the types and extent of dissonance in terms of expectations and requirements and their significance for the quality of the interaction experienced (Bormann et al., 2025a). The experienced quality of and motivation for training as an ECE should also be addressed in relation to their decision-making competence (Anders, 2012). Building on the results of the present exploratory study, ECE professionals’ biographical experiences may offer a fruitful avenue for future research into the roots of their situational affective perceptions in pedagogical interactions with parents (Voss & Kluczniok, 2025). Inviting ECE professionals to reflect on their own upbringing and understanding of parenthood could serve as a starting point for self-reflective processes (ibid.)—ones in which experienced cognitive dissonance is reframed not merely as a moment of vulnerability, but as an opportunity for professional learning and growth.