From the moment of their first breath, newborn babies need the care of a loving adult. All babies deserve the best care possible to ensure healthy development and success in life. Parents are babies’ first teachers, but when parents must work, they rely on others to care for their babes. Either yours or a child care provider’s loving care, a variety of activity opportunities, and interactions with other babies will help your infant or the infants in your care to grow and thrive.
In the blog Finding Child Care for Your Small Child, Part One: Considering Quality, I wrote about balancing an expectation of finding the ideal care with the reality of what’s available, what to expect in quality programs, and barriers to finding quality care. After considering the quality of a program, other things to think about…
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One of the hardest things to do as a parent in the U.S. is finding child care for your small child. If you found your way to this blog post via a search on what to look for when looking for care for your child, then you are in a privileged position. Too many of…
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Death is a part of life that touches us all and is rarely addressed in early childhood education. If you are a teacher who has faced the loss of a student, friend, co-worker, or parent, maybe you understand how personally confronting and awkward it can be to carry on as the leader of your group…
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Exploring art and music are wonderful ways to connect with babies and encourage their growth. Colors and textures found in books, paintings, fabrics, and other materials will stimulate your baby’s brain development. The Young Artist Art helps us learn about shapes, colors, and lines. Art also nurtures our creativity and brings out deep feelings. When…
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Did you know one of the most natural parts of caring and educating young children is assessing them? We think about if they’ve gotten enough sleep, what we should feed them, how they will spend their time with us, how they are behaving, what they are learning, and more of course. When caring for and…
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Learning begins at birth! With every new sight, sound, smell, and personal interaction, her brain is making new connections that will last a lifetime. During her first few months of life, she will eat and sleep often. After this time, she will begin to move her head from side to side to see who’s in…
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Healthy babies are born with certain natural responses, which are called reflexes. You can try to engage your baby’s reflexes, but it is important to trust your pediatrician’s or other trained professional’s results over your own. If your baby doesn’t have one of these reflexes, or if a reflex isn’t disappearing within a normal timeframe,…
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Okay, so what I have to share here may be very obvious to you, or it’s not. Some family cultures teach folks to let babies cry because “that’s just what babies do” (yes, I know this is quite controversial, and a topic for another blog) and to teach independence we need to leave them alone…
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Please understand that in most cases babies are just too little to think logically therefore too little for us to expect them to understand not to hurt themselves, others, or stuff! “Discipline” for an infant means meeting her needs and providing a predictable life with predictable behaviors from those around her. I’ve heard moms talk…
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As babies start to make sense of their world, they are learning the basics of math and science…yes, right from the start!! Examples of how your baby practices math are having and then losing a favorite toy (adding and subtracting) and choosing one food over another at dinnertime (sorting.) Math skills start when your baby…
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