Parenting Partnerships
The Hardest Thing About Working With Children
Ask any parent, provider or teacher what the hardest thing about working with children is and eventually the discussion will come down to the bottom line: Developing a Partnership for raising a child together is complex. No one is going to try to tell you that forming a partnership that creates the best outcomes for the child is going to be an easy task, but the end results, when you are successful are so incredibly worth the effort. The satisfaction in watching a child grow more self confident, competent, independent and be a part of facilitating in their development of skills is just the coolest most rewarding feeling each party will ever get a chance to experience. We want each of you to get the opportunity to know what that is like, so each of our Parent Provider Partnership Tip Sheets is going to build towards that end result.
This Tip Sheet is going to acknowledge how complex this job is and discuss some of the hardest parts of this task. It is also going to start us on the path towards success.
What is so complex about working together?
· Culture:Definition of Culture: “Culture” is: A: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. B: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time <popular culture> <southern culture.
What does all of this mean? It means that each of us carries with us a piece of how we were raised and the things that were taught to us by our previous generations. To some degree, we all understand that. All we need to do is think about how difficult marriage is. Both partners come into a relationship having had differences in their education and experience regarding how to handle differences of opinions, conflicts, child guidance, how to entertain company, how to relax, the value of education, responsibilities and values. This information and our family experiences impact how we live and how we will socialize our children. The inability to communicate and compromise our culture with our partner is the reason for the large number of marriages that do not succeed.
Now, we are placing our children into a variety of other cultures: the child care programs we choose for our children and then, the school systems we choose or are forced to participate in. Since the child care programs are the first place children will experience different cultures outside the family, caregivers are given the first opportunity to help parents with this process and parents offer providers the first opportunity providers have at developing skills necessary to help their own families to deal with the issues of cultural differences and successful partnerships building that benefit children.
Some of you may be aware that breast or bottle feeding and toilet training have a basis that is more in the cultural aspects of raising children more than developmental.
In our American culture, the idea of encouraging a child to walk by age 1, to be off of the bottle or terminate breast feeding by age one seems often to be of equal importance. In some cultures, children are breast fed much longer, perhaps until age 3 or 4. The term “toddler” is foreign or nonexistent in some cultures. Children are referred to as “lap babies” and may be carried by their mothers for the first couple of years of their lives. The point we are trying to make is that what we may have been socialized to accept as “right” or “wrong”, correct “developmental expectations are not written in stone and may be considered as incorrect in some cultures as they are accepted as correct in ours.
I honestly have never known of a normal child who was not potty trained before kindergarten. Whether or not a child is broken of the bottle or the breast by age 12 months is not going to have a major impact on the world.
As a parent, I can imagine that having a provider ask me questions about how I feel about or handle certain aspects of raising my child, such as what we eat, how we eat, when we eat, how I believe potty training should go, where and how my child sleeps, what I would most value my child to learn as social skills, or how I handle child guidance would be perhaps a little intimidating at first, but feel so caring also, that it would be a good as well as challenging experience for me. Then, as a provider, being allowed to take the time to share how we did things in my family and how things work in child care, would be so validating of my role in a child’s development. This would be a great start in opening a door to learning about each other and putting together a plan that would work for both families and have a great impact on the child’s development, comfort and trust and result in building relationships for your business and customer relationships that could have long lasting beneficial results.
The one thing both parent and provider have in common is often a lack of appreciation for the importance of our work. We so often hear people say “I am just a mom” or “I am just a family child care provider”. We can make a start in changing the image even amongst ourselves by having a discussion that says “I really want to know what you think or how you feel or how you would handle this and why so we can compare our thoughts, ideas and knowledge for the benefit of the child.”
· Training
As providers take more training, they come to value the importance of how much easier it can make their job. The same is true of parents. There are four levels of competence in training. The first level is unconscious incompetence. At this level, we don’t even know what we don’t know. Through training and communication, providers and parents can be a value to each other in discovering different perspectives and techniques for problem solving. The second level is Conscious Incompetence. This is probably the scariest. We are now aware that we have so much more to learn and are fearful of making mistakes. The third level is Conscious Competence. We now know what to do, but it does not come easy. We need to think all of the time so we don’t make a mistake. Schedules, calendars, clock watching are ever present in our thoughts. The fourth level is Unconscious Competence. We are so comfortable with our jobs that we just have routines, problem solving, etc. down pat. We operate like a well oiled machine. Working and talking with parents, sharing resources, helps us all reach this point and raise children for success.
