Crying and Laughing

The Emotional Development of Infants and Toddlers

Donna Wittmer, Deanna W. Clauson

• Publisher: Gryphon House Inc.
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780876598399
• eBook ISBN:
  9780876598405
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

The authors of the acclaimed book From Biting to Hugging: Understanding Social Development in Infants and Toddlers bring educators another go-to infant and toddler resource in Crying and Laughing: The Emotional Development of Infants and Toddlers. Learn crucial skills for creating a safe and nurturing environment for infants and toddlers in your care.

• Understand how young children's emotions develop
• Create responsive and nurturing teacher-child interactions
• Help children manage strong emotions
• Reduce children's emotional stress
• Foster family engagement
• Care for yourself

Key TEN
Know and Appreciate Your Importance

In this chapter you will learn the following:

• The importance of developing caring relationships with infants and toddlers as an important, powerful, and influential part of your profession
• Strategies to create trusting relationships with families for the children’s benefit
• How to partner with families to support children’s emotional development
• The importance of recognizing children’s influence on you
• Strategies to manage your feelings with children
• The importance of finding a coach or mentor who is emotionally available to you
• What to do when you are feeling stressed
• The importance of you

The infant and toddler caregiving profession is one of the most rewarding and most challenging of all professions. This career requires that teachers develop warm, caring, and loving relationships with children. Young children must feel cherished, admired, safe, and secure in order to thrive. Your profession requires that you develop close and trusting relationships with children and families. Most professions do not demand the same level of compassion and affection for the people served by them.

Appreciating the Significance of Caring Relationships

You are an incredibly important person in young children’s lives. Your mutually caring relationships with the infants and toddlers you spend time with each day influence whether they thrive or not. You will know if an infant feels safe with you if she nestles into you and you can easily calm her crying. You will know if a toddler genuinely likes you if she greets you with a smile, wants to be near you many times during a day, and quickly scampers close to you for emotional refueling. These infants and toddlers quickly learn whether they can trust you to meet their needs and whether they enjoy and feel secure with you. The caring relationships that you experience with infants and toddlers build their sense of well-being, which will affect them now and in the future. The feelings of self-worth that you help them develop become a part of who they are and influence how they love and learn. You are important in infants’ and toddlers’ lives.

Creating Trusting Relationships with Families to Support the Children and You

You understand that creating trusting relationships with families is important for young children’s sense of well-being and emotional development. A positive relationship between teachers and families eases families’ concerns and makes your job easier and much more emotionally satisfying. Listening to families’ hopes, dreams, wishes, and concerns about their children is a first step toward developing trusting relationships with family members. Another way is to share positive stories with them. When you share the good times in your program, family members feel positive about their child and you.

When Sam, twenty-three months old, bit Carlos on the arm (without breaking the skin), Carlos went running to the teacher. He held up his arm for her to see and said, “Sam bite.” Before his teacher could say or do anything, Carlos ran back to Sam and exclaimed, “No bite, friend.” When the teacher told this story to Carlos’s grandmother at the end of the day, his grandmother beamed with pride.

Because you share good times, you develop positive relationships with families that allow you to share information that may be more difficult to communicate.

Express to parents that you recognize parenting is not easy. That is why it is important for you and family members to cherish and focus on the positive moments. Relational savoring is the term used by Burkhart et al. (2015) to describe cherishing or prolonging the emotions associated with positive events and bonding experiences between the parent and child. In one study about this topic, researchers encouraged a group of parents to embrace relational savoring in their interactions with their children. Another group of parents was encouraged to savor their own individual experiences rather than relationship experiences with their children. After two years, those parents who used relational-savoring techniques reported more feelings of closeness with their children than did parents who were told to savor their own individual experiences (Burkhart et al., 2015).

Partnering with Families to Help You Support Infants’ and Toddlers’ Emotional Development

Partnering with families to support children’s emotional development helps you, children, and families. Children are happier and less stressed when teachers and families emotionally connect to form an alliance for children’s benefit. When you and families work closely together to build infants’ and toddlers’ emotional competence, everyone thrives. Your job becomes easier when both you and families emphasize children’s emotional competence at home and in your program.

Model for families the following emotion-building strategies with children in the program. Also, share them with family members through texts, bulletin boards, newsletters, special notes, posters with pictures, and when discussing emotional development of the children with their family members.

• Share information about how important it is for young children to gain emotional knowledge. For infants and toddlers to gain emotional knowledge, adults must talk often about emotions—both children’s and their own.
• Share information about the importance of not minimizing children’s emotions, but instead using words to describe children’s emotions (Ornaghi et al., 2019).
• Encourage families to use emotional coaching strategies, such as encouraging their children to describe how they are feeling (Lauw et al., 2014).

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Table of contents

• Key ONEUnderstand the Power of Emotions and the Importance of Relationships
• Key TWOKnow the Goals for Children’s Emotional Competence
• Key THREEUnderstand Brain Development and the Importance of Emotional Competence
• Key FOURKnow How and When Children Develop Their Emotional Skills
• Key FIVEUse Relationship-Building Strategies that Support Emotional Competence
• Key SIXUse Teacher-Child Interaction Strategies to Build Emotional Competence
• Key SEVENCraft an Emotionally Rich, Caring Curriculum and Environment
• Key EIGHTLearn Strategies to Support Children’s Feelings and Temperaments
• Key NINEUnderstand the Different Types of Emotional Stress
• Key TENKnow and Appreciate Your Importance