Working Well with Babies

Comprehensive Competencies for Educators of Infants and Toddlers

Claire D. Vallotton, Holly Brophy-Herb, Lori Roggman, Rachel Chazan-Cohen

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781605545516
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Working Well with Babies describes the comprehensive competencies (including the knowledge, dispositions, and skills) that educators of infants and toddlers must have to provide optimal support for infants and toddlers. Designed as a learning resource for both in-service and pre-service infant/toddler practitioners, this text details the nine competency dimensions of infant/toddler educators developed by the Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/Toddler Development (CUPID). The nine competencies are
1. Reflective Practice2. Building and Supporting Relationships
3. Partnering with and Supporting Diverse Families
4. Guiding Infant and Toddler Behavior
5. Supporting Development and Learning
6. Assessing Behavior, Development, & Environments
7. Including Infants and Toddlers with Special Needs
8. Professionalism
9. Mentoring, Leadership, and Supporting Competencies in AdultsSupplemental appendices include rich and well-organized information to build core knowledge of development over the first three years and apply this knowledge to practice.?Reproducibles?designed to enhance active and engaged learning are organized by chapter and provide examples, reflective exercises, and information to share with families.

CHAPTER 1

Educators of Infants and Toddlers

—with Gina Cook and Jean Ispa

The science of child development paints a clear and critical picture: how well a child is doing at age three is a good predictor for how that child will do in school and even later in life. Our earliest experiences lay the foundation for how we will learn and interact with others. By age three, children already show great variation in the complexity of their brains, in the number of words they know, and in the ways they establish relationships with adults and peers. These differences are in part based on the characteristics the children were born with, but they also depend to a large degree on the children’s experiences with the adults in their world.

There is growing recognition that the first three years of life are a distinct developmental period. As babies (children under three years) undergo rapid brain development, they are highly reliant on relationships with adults and highly responsive to environmental quality. During this critical growth period, the majority of infants (babies under eighteen months) and toddlers (babies between eighteen months and three years) in the United States spend time in out-of-home care each day, and at least one-third of those children are enrolled in center-based care. In fact, 40 percent of children in out-of-home care spend thirty-five hours or more per week in child care placements, clocking in more than eighteen hundred hours per year in care settings. Think of how differently this care and educational experience adds up for a child who has a highly qualified educator, compared to a child with an adult who meets their basic needs but does not have the skills, knowledge, or disposition to truly support their development.

These earliest years provide a unique opportunity for adults to have a long-term impact on children’s future outcomes across a range of developmental domains. Research by economist James Heckman (2008) underscores the long-term societal economic advantages of investing in high-quality early childhood programming for babies and young children. No wonder, then, that families (people with whom a child has an ongoing relationship defined by family roles, regardless of biological or legal relationship), educators, and policy makers have been paying more attention to the quality of infant and toddler care and education. For several decades, the preschool period (ages three to four) was seen as the time to make children “ready for school.” Today the infant-toddler period is the new frontier of school readiness. Educators and researchers are making efforts to professionalize the early care and education workforce, define learning objectives for infants and toddlers, and provide guidance in best practices to support school readiness beginning in infancy. For example, whereas in 2010 only thirty-one states reported having early learning guidelines (ELG) specifically for infants and toddlers, by 2013 forty-five states had such guidelines and twenty-eight states had specific certifications for infant-toddler care providers. This has led to increasing demands for professional degrees or certifications for practitioners working with infants and toddlers.

As we focus on this age group, we must guard against simply pushing frameworks developed for older children down to the infant and toddler years. In fact, new ways of conceptualizing infant-toddler outcomes and best practices could be pushed up to benefit the care and education of preschoolers. Many preschool frameworks were developed with an eye toward integrating them with elementary school guidelines, but instead preschoolers would benefit from practices used with younger children that encourage more attention to relationships and quality interactions, connections among developmental domains, exploration, and play.

In this book, we use the terms educator and practitioner interchangeably to reflect professionals working with infants, toddlers, and their families. Many titles are applied to those who work with young children and families. This book refers to practitioners as those who work with babies and families in any professional context, and the term educator for those who intentionally support others’ development and learning, including educators of infants and toddlers, regardless of their professional title. We use the term baby to reinforce the idea that infants and toddlers under three are vulnerable and reliant on their relationships with adults, even after they start to walk and talk. This book can be used by the practitioner who is eager to learn more about quality infant-toddler care and education and wants to develop as a professional, or it can be used as a course textbook for a student planning to work with infants, toddlers, and their families. While the book primarily addresses those who work in group care settings (center-based and family child care), figure 1.1 shows how we understand the overlapping roles within the infant-toddler workforce, including those of infant-toddler educators, home visitors (professionals who work with parents or families in the context of the family’s home) or family educators (professionals who provide education to families about children, parenting, and family life), and family advocates, and the shared and unique competencies needed for each role. The book will focus on developing these competencies—the knowledge, dispositions, and skills—that help infant-toddler educators support child well-being through direct care.

Figure 1.1. Overlapping Roles and Competencies for Infant-Toddler Professionals

Why Focus on Infants and Toddlers? Brains, Dependency, and Relationships

Why do educators need specific skills to work with infants and toddlers? What is so special about this age, anyway? One answer is brains! The human brain grows more in the first three years of life than it will during the rest of the lifespan. This rapid growth makes the brain especially open to influences from experience. Young children (between birth and age eight years) are especially vulnerable to negative experiences but also exceptionally open to the benefits of positive experiences. Development during this period sets the stage for development and learning in preschool, elementary school, and life in general.

The second reason the first three years are unique and require special skills from educators is that babies are completely dependent upon the adults in their lives not only for safety and basic care, but also for emotional connection and cognitive stimulation. They rely on us to perceive and interpret their needs and subtle cues so that we can communicate on their behalf. Infants—and also toddlers who are just learning to talk—need the important adults in their lives to communicate with one another about their experiences, behaviors, and needs, including parents (those with a parenting role, regardless of biological or legal relationship) and other family members, other caregivers (any adult who takes care of babies in an ongoing relationship), educators, and other professionals. Babies can’t do this for themselves.

The third reason this is a special time has to do with the ways in which babies’ brains are shaped by relationships. As you will learn in chapter 3, consistent, caring relationships provide infants and toddlers with the sense of security they need to fully explore their environments. Exploration is important because it promotes motor and cognitive development. Moreover, babies’ emotional connections with adults provide crucial stimulation for their brains, particularly the areas involved in learning about others (for example, developing empathy), developing their sense of themselves (self-worth), and expressing and regulating emotions. These are essential skills for getting along in the world.

Because of the vulnerability and opportunity of the first three years—the fast growth of the brain, the total dependence on adults, and the critical role of relationships—infant-toddler educators need unique competencies based on knowledge, dispositions, and skills, to accomplish high-quality work.

Babies Get Lost in the Field of Early Childhood Education

Another reason we focus on the competencies of infant-toddler educators is that there are few relevant sets of standards for this age level set by departments of education or accrediting agencies. Most standards for early child educator competencies either focus on teachers working with preschool-age children or are very broad, covering the whole early childhood period from birth to age eight years old. Covering such a broad age range often means the competencies most related to infants and toddlers get short shrift.

Babies—and their educators—get lost in early childhood education for reasons like these:

1 “Education” is assumed to start at five years old, and “early education” is assumed to start at three years old.

2 Educational services for children five years and older are paid for by the public, but educational services for children under five are paid for by families unless children are in early special education or other intervention programs (like those for families living in poverty).

3 Work with infants and toddlers has been seen as low-skill work (hence the ubiquitous term babysitting) and as primarily women’s work.

4 Many professionals who work with babies and their families—including medical professionals, public health workers, and social workers—are not trained in child development or early education.

In this book, we argue that working with babies and their families involves both care and education, and it is one of the most complex and challenging jobs in our society. While this book is focused on infant-toddler educators who work in group care settings, these competencies also extend to those who work as home visitors—and in fact, ...