Investigation of self-regulation skills in children’s picturebooks: a quantitative content analysis

Abstract

Objective Early childhood is a key time for developing self-regulation, which underpins school readiness and socio-emotional wellbeing. The aim of the study is to provide a quantitative assessment of the representational affordances of children’s picturebooks and their pedagogical potential to support behavioral, emotional, and cognitive self-regulation when mediated by adult-guided reading practice Methods A purposive sample of 120 domestic and translated picturebooks published in Türkiye between 2014 and 2025 was evaluated within a quantitative document analysis design. The Picturebook Evaluation Scale provided an objective measure of the capacity of these books along the three subdimensions of self-regulation. Results The results reveal that a substantial proportion of the sample (70.8%) contains features associated with general self-regulation. The books in the behavioral domain performed best, with 80.8% explicitly modeling adaptive actions and impulse control. However, 59.2% of the sample demonstrated partially adequate capacity to support emotional self-regulation. Notably, translated picturebooks scored significantly higher in the emotional domain than domestic literature, which often omitted the internal mental states of characters. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation was observed between the structural and aesthetic qualities of a book (e.g., text-image coherence, absence of stereotypes) and its overall potential to support self-regulation. Discussion In summary, these results show that high-quality picturebooks contain significant representational affordances that, beyond early literacy, have the pedagogical potential to support the socio-emotional readiness of young children. Adult engagement with children’s literature through structured dialogic reading practices is necessary to allow children’s literature to better reflect the inner emotional lives of characters so that children can reach their full developmental potential.