Recently I was lucky enough to attend a training institute put on by Zero to Three, a large American organization that works to ensure that babies and toddlers have a strong start in life.
I was really impacted by LaRue Allen, Cheryl Polk and Ross Thompson’s talk titled, Changing Untenable Conditions for Early Educators: Focus on the Infant-Toddlers Workforce. A big part of my job is hosting family literacy training for early childhood education and care workers. These are some of the people who make up our infant-toddler workforce in the Northwest Territories.
Children learn from birth. Development and learning happen very fast in the early years and lay the foundation for lifelong progress and well-being. Our early childhood workers have a huge impact on the health, development, and learning of the children in their care.
So how do we provide the best conditions for our infant-toddler workforce? Here are three things I learned.
- Consistent and continuous support is critical for children, but often the needs of an individual child are lost in our fragmented early childhood education and care system. Too often, information about the needs of individual children does not get passed on to new care providers. As a result, they don’t know what skills they should be building, or what skills have already been worked on, so children are not helped as efficiently as they could be.
- The quality of a child's relationships with adults is central to their learning. If a child feels safe it is easier for them to focus on learning. We often worry only about the needs of children, but the needs of their caregivers are also important. Children feel safer, and are better behaved and adjusted, when their caregivers are happy, well paid and not stressed about unpaid bills or issues at home.
- Practices, policies, and workforce preparation often don’t keep up with our evolving knowledge about child development. We know now that high-level skills are needed to provide high-quality care and education for babies and preschool children. Workers nurture more than thinking skills. They help children learn skills such as determination, initiative, curiosity and self-regulation, and support the development of social-emotional skills, physical health and overall well-being. This is a huge responsibility for those who work in early childhood education and care. The training and pay we provide to this workforce must evolve to reflect early education research and our newer understandings about the importance of the early years.
-- Charlotte Upton
