The Brave Elephant Program is a multicomponent intervention delivered over 18 weeks targeting early childhood education professionals, preschool children and their parents.

The Brave Elephant Program is implemented across three parallel components. The professional component is delivered by two trained psychologists through psychoeducational workshops and individualized classroom coaching sessions. This component focuses on understanding behavioral inhibition, promoting positive relationships, emotional regulation, social engagement and social problem-solving. The child component is delivered by early education professionals in the classroom through age-appropriate didactic activities (e.g., modeling/role-play, mindfulness activities, and supervised free play with adults and peers to enhance socioemotional competence. The family component is also delivered by early education professionals, by sharing the materials and activities that are implemented in the classroom with parents to promote skill generalization across contexts.

The BIQ consists of 30 items that assess parent perceptions of the child's BI, considering six contexts that reflect three domains: Social Novelty (14 items), which refers to the child's inhibited behaviors toward unfamiliar adults, unfamiliar peers, and performance situations in front of others; Situational Novelty (12 items), which refers to the child's inhibited behaviors during separation and at preschool and unfamiliar situations; and Physical Activities (four items), which refers to the child's inhibited behaviors when there is a minor possible risk of injury. For each item, parents were asked to report how frequently their children displayed inhibited behaviors, using a Likert scale ranging from 1 (Almost Never) to 7 (Almost Always). Higher total scores in the BIQ indicated higher levels of child BI.

This teacher and parent rating scale is one of the most widely used to assess emotion regulation of children in preschool and school-age children. The ERC consists of 24 itens, answered in a a 4-point Likert response (1=never, 2=sometimes, 3=often, 4=almost always). The ERC comprises two subscales: Emotion Regulation, that includes 8 items measuring adaptive regulation processes, such as socially appropriate emotional displays and empathy; and Emotional Lability/Negativity, that includes 15 items assessing mood lability, inflexibility, dysregulated negative affect, and inappropriate affective displays. Higher scores in the Emotion Regulation subscale indicate greater emotion regulation capacity, whereas higher scores in Emotional Lability/Negativity reflect greater emotional dysregulation.

This 30-item rating scale assessed parent perceptions about the affective quality of the relationships that children aged 30-78 months establish with peers and significant adults in context. This rating scale has been widely used in different cultures and provides a standardized description of affect and behavior in context, discriminating behavioral-emotional problems and social adjustment. Items were answered using a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 6 (always). The SCBE-30 consists of three scales with 10 items each: Anger-Aggression, referring to externalizing behaviors; Anxiety-Withdrawal, encompassing internalizing behaviors; and Social Competence, assessing prosocial behaviors.

This teacher rating scale is composed of a total of 15 items, of which 7 items evaluate closeness and 8 items evaluate conflict in the student-teacher relationship. For each item the teacher rates the degree to which the item applies to his relationship with one individual student, from 1 (definitely does not apply) to 5 (definitely applies). The raw scores consist of the sum of item responses. Therefore, the closeness dimension can vary between 7 and 35 and the conflict dimension can vary between 8 and 40. The total score of the STRS consists on the sum of all the items (with the items of the conflict dimension inverted) and varies between 15 and 75.

Enrollment rate will be measured as the proportion of eligible individuals contacted who consent to participate during the recruitment period (prior to Week 0).