Know

As an infant and toddler caregiver, you play an important role in guiding the behavior of young children. You recognize the opportunity to consider infants’ and toddlers’ strengths, temperaments, skills, development and family culture as you determine your approaches and strategies to supporting and influencing behavior. In essence, you maintain a relationship-based approach to guiding infants’ and toddlers’ behavior while meeting their needs.

What is Guidance?

What comes to mind as you think about the wordguidance?

指导你帮助孩子学习的方式交货pectations for behavior in a variety of settings. It is how you help children know what it means to be a member of your community. It means helping children learn from their mistakes and make positive choices. As you read this information, it is also important to think about what guidance isnot. Guidance is not punishment. It is not about control or making children fear adults. It is about knowing children and creating the best physical and social environment in which they can learn.

Your approach to guidance for infants and toddlers is influenced by your childhood experiences and your personal beliefs about caregiving and guidance. Some caregivers may believe it is their responsibility to control the behaviors of infants and toddlers, while others may believe that infants and toddlers learn best through free experiences. It is important to explore and reflect on your understanding of your role and the ways your beliefs shape the guidance you are providing infants and toddlers in your program. When guidance is viewed as a process of understanding and supporting the development of skills, the needs of infants and toddlers can be understood, respected, and met.

Guidance for Infants and Toddlers

If you have ever had a guide during a trip to a new place, what was the role of this guide? Your guide was probably someone who shared information so you knew what to expect. Your guide may have provided you a map of the area you were visiting or modeled how to do something specific, such as how to swing the golf club at a miniature golf course. A guide, like you as a caregiver, helps show the way, encourages participation and exploration, models appropriate behaviors, and offers support so those being guided can be and feel successful.

Guidance in the field of infant and toddler caregiving is about strategies for helping infants and toddlers learn about the world around them and the behaviors that help them to become more involved in their social world, while respecting family and community cultures.

For example, as a toddler uses his fingers to mash his banana, a caregiver might say, “It looks like you like the feel of the banana as you squish it through your fingers. Bananas are for eating. When you’re finished eating, we’ll clean up together and go over to the table with the play-doh. Play-doh will feel good to squish, too!”

Gartrell (2004), inThe Power of Guidance, describes six practices of caregivers who are committed to positive guidance:

Practice	Implementation Process
The caregiver realizes that social skills are complicated and take many years to fully learn.	Children are learning socially acceptable behavior, and it takes time and practice to develop social skills. Families and caregivers guide children to learn social skills.
The caregiver reduces the need for children to engage in mistaken behavior.	The caregiver uses developmentally appropriate practices in order to have an appropriate match between the program’s expectations and the child’s skills.
The caregiver practices positive teacher-child relations.	The caregiver builds relationships with each individual child and models cooperation and empathy.
The caregiver uses intervention methods that are solution oriented.	The caregiver models how to resolve conflicts peaceably and encourages children to negotiate for themselves as they develop. The caregiver works at managing and monitoring his or her own feelings and growth as a developing professional.
The caregiver builds partnerships with families.	From the time the child enters the program, the caregiver builds positive relationships with family members through positive notes, phone calls, meetings and conferences.
The caregiver uses teamwork with adults.	The caregiver understands that she or he cannot do everything alone and creates a team with other adults (including family members and volunteers). Positive guidance involves teamwork with other skilled adults, especially if a child has consistent, intensive challenging behavior.

Importance of Guidance for Infants and Toddlers

The first three years of life are prime learning time to intentionally support infants and toddlers through interactions, the environment, experiences, activities and materials. By doing so, you are helping infants and toddlers develop one of the most important skills for school and lifelong success—self-regulation, which is the ability to recognize and control one’s feelings and behaviors. Research has shown that self-regulation, the foundation of which is built in children’s birth to five experiences, is a critical life skill (Galinsky, 2010). It enables us to focus our attention, inhibit our impulses, plan our actions, cooperate with others and show empathy.

Providing appropriate guidance for infants and toddlers can help ensure developmentally appropriate learning of self-regulation and the opportunity to learn which behaviors are most appropriate and acceptable within different situations and environments. Caregivers use many different guidance strategies in nurturing and supporting self-regulation, such as:

• Observing
• Listening
• Providing clear and consistent limits
• Describing and modeling appropriate behavior
• 预测问题,利用h之间的关系elp infants and toddlers feel supported when solving problems
• 帮助婴儿和幼儿感到安全，识别并响应他们的强烈情绪

The consistent use of supportive guidance strategies allows infants and toddlers to feel your respect and concern for their wellbeing. Your guidance provides infants and toddlers with time to learn all that you are striving to share with and teach them.

Recognizing the Needs of Infants and Toddlers

When considering approaches to guiding infant and toddler behavior, it’s most helpful to start with a recognition and understanding of the particular needs of infants and toddlers, specifically needs of safety, respect, understanding, and secure and responsive relationships. The importance of adult caregivers supporting and meeting these needs is highlighted throughout all of the Infant and Toddler courses, as these needs are not only the foundation for considerations around guidance, but overall development, growth and learning.

Impact of Culture and Experience on Guidance

There are multiple factors that can influence how we, as adults, respond to a child’s behavior, including how we were raised, our personal values and beliefs, and our understanding of child development. Through careful consideration of these factors, we can better understand and improve our interactions with children and their families. This will positively influence the overall development of the infants and toddlers we serve. Consider a few examples of culturally determined adult expectations of children:

• The age at which a child feeds or dresses herself or himself
• The age at which a child uses the toilet independently
• Whether and when a child sleeps independently
• The amount and nature of eye contact between children and adults
• Expectations for how adults and children talk to one another (e.g., acceptability of questioning adults, talking over one another, etc.)
• The ways adults and children show affection (hugging, etc.)

A mismatch between our own expectations and a child’s behavior (or family’s priorities) may cause tension. It is important to understand the variability in behaviors that might be culturally determined. In attempting to do that, it may be helpful to reflect on how yourownupbringing influences howyouview child guidance. For example, if you grew up in a strict home, you may view guidance very differently from a colleague who grew up in a home with few rules. You will learn more about the importance of understanding culture-based behaviors in Lesson Two.

自己的成长经历可能会影响的本·aviors you tolerate. For example, think about how you would respond if an older toddler left your short circle time without permission. While some teachers may have considered this child’s behavior challenging or problematic, and therefore may have expected the child to return to circle, others may think that this behavior demonstrates the child’s sense of independence and choice-making. This belief could cause the teacher to ignore the behavior. Neither of these responses are right or wrong; they are simply representations of how culture and experiences shape individuals’ approaches to guidance.

See

Do

Infants and toddlers need the support of nurturing and responsive adults to help them grow and develop. Below are some ways you can provide guidance for the infants and toddlers in your care:

• 继续了解在您的护理人员中了解婴儿和幼儿，了解他们的气质，兴趣和文化。了解婴儿和幼儿可以帮助您提供尊重的指导，响应他们的需求和支持关系。
• Examine and evaluate your environment. Can mobile infants access areas with ease? Are there enough materials for infants and toddlers?
• Watch and stay close during play and social interactions.
• Build in opportunities throughout the day to help young children relax.
• Model positive behavior to show that you accept, control, and express strong feelings in safe ways.
• Maintain developmentally appropriate expectations for infants and toddlers.

Completing this Course

For more information on what to expect in this course, the Positive Guidance Competency Reflection, and a list of the accompanying Learn, Explore and Apply resources and activities offered throughout the lessons, visit the Infant & Toddler Positive GuidanceCourse Guide.

请注意，每个课程结束时的引用和资源部分概述了参考源和资源，以查找有关所涵盖主题的其他信息。当您完成课程时，您预计不会审查所有可用的在线参考。但是，欢迎您进一步探索资源，如果您有兴趣或培训师，教练或管理员的要求进一步探索资源。