Let’s talk about biting, hitting, pinching, kicking and scratching.

 I have recently learned that there are many childcare centers that terminate for things that are developmentally appropriate.  One of our parents shared with me recently that the center her child was at before coming to us had such a policy for biting and that her 10-month-old was on bite number two, with the third bit meaning they would be terminated. 

Parents are under enough stress without having to worry about their whole life being disrupted because their infant behaves in a developmentally appropriate way.  I know it is upsetting when your child gets hurt while at childcare. Over the years, I have had many parents threaten to leave over their child being bitten.  I feel these policies are a knee jerk reaction to such threats. 

Creating policy that punishes a family for their child behaving like a child, is a missed opportunity. It is a missed opportunity to educate parents on natural child development.  It is a missed opportunity to educate parents on why biting happens and what to do when it happens.  It is a missed opportunity to educate parents to see what is often seen as misbehaving, as what is really is, natural child development.

When one toddler hurts another, it is rarely, if ever, an act of aggression.  In this piece I am going to use the word bite to stand in for all the words listed in the title to avoid having to list them all the time. When we have a child who bites our first step of action is to look at what was happening right before the bite.  There are some obvious reasons like fighting over a toy or someone was in their way, and sometimes there seems to be no cause. 

One common reason for biting is frustration. Not necessarily frustration at what just happened but built-up frustration. I’m sure most of us can recall a time when we had a rough day and then snapped at someone for some small infraction.  The same thing happens with toddlers, maybe their morning was rushed, and they didn’t like their breakfast and one friend had taken a toy and now another friend looks like they might take a toy and snap, they bite that friend.  To the observer, it looks like they bit for no reason, but that is not really the case.

Another common reason for biting is a lack of verbal skills.  We all know that in a toddler’s brain, what they had 10 minutes ago is still theirs.  They see another child start to pick up a toy they had earlies and without the words to say “hey, that’s mine” they use the tools they have and bite.  

Curiosity is also another reason for biting.  I have seen toddlers look at another child and simply bit them just to see what happens.  Experimenting is what toddlers do and they don’t know that biting is not an allowed form of experimentation.  Just yesterday, I had a toddler who was sitting near me, bend over and bite the tip of my slipper. This child was not mad at me, this child was not wanting to hurt me, this child simply looked at my slipper and thought “I wonder what it would feel like to bite that?”

None of these children are being bad, they are expressing emotions, communicating and experimenting.  Which is exactly what they are supposed to be doing.

 

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How do we do it -nap time

 

We often hear from families that they are amazed that we are able to get all of the children to sleep at the same time.  So, today I thought I would share what we do to help that happen.  First, I must state that we are not always successful at this, but the majority of the time, these things work.

Routine, I think this is the biggest thing we do to reach this goal. While things do not always happen at the same time, they always happen in the same order.  After lunch the children use the restroom, pick out a book and a stuffy and then sit on their cot looking at their book until all the children are on their cots.  Then the teacher who gets to read (we all love reading at nap and so we take turns) gathers the books and sits down, usually near the youngest two.  The teacher and the children take big deep breaths and then the teacher reads.  Before the last book is read, they all take more deep breaths.  After the last book we turn on the naptime music mix and ocean sounds on a sound machine.   These things always happen in that very order.

Tenacity, sometimes all it takes is being willing to sit or lie next to them and rub their backs or their heads for a good ten/fifteen/twenty minutes.  If someone starts moving their fingers in an attempt to stay awake, we gently rub their arm or hand.  Think about how it feels when you get a scalp massage our when someone gives a gentle massage.

Get tricky, often we have older children who tell us that they are not tired.  We tell them that we understand that they don’t feel tired, but we need to be sure. We tell them that if they really are not tired, they should be able to lie still for one minute with their eyes closed.  We let them get comfy and close their eyes and then we start counting, low and slow.  If they move, we simply start back at one, each time they move or open their eyes, we start over.  Generally, we never make it to 60. Sometimes I will combine counting with a back rub or holding their hand. 

Be flexible, somedays they may need a back rub and for you to count, somedays they might need you to hold their hand and say “shhhhh” (that’s another trick we sometimes use.) The most important thing is to stay calm, without falling asleep yourself.  Just yesterday I had a four-year-old who wanted to snuggle, I focused on taking deep relaxing breaths, she was asleep in less than 10 minutes, and I was very close to sleeping myself.  

So, when you see photos of classrooms of napping children, it is not magic, it is just determined teachers who have a book of tricks up their sleeves to make it happen.  Hopefully you can use some of these tricks at home too. 

 The work of childhood!! 

Imagine you go into work in the morning and the boss says you can work freely on whatever you want, you find a project that interests you and you get into it, but before you are finished, you are called to a team meeting. This meeting may be about something that is of interest or importance to you, and it may not be, but you will have to sit and pay attention for the whole meeting because this is important to your boss.  Let's say the meeting lasted 30 minutes and then the boss says you are free to work on any project you want as long as it is one of the prechosen projects.  Some of these projects are ones that can be completed in minutes, and some are ones you can really get into and keep at for hours. It doesn’t matter what task you choose; you must stay at it for the next 20 minutes. When those 20 minutes are up, you must move on to another prearranged task and again, stay at it for 20 minutes which might be too long or might not be long enough to complete the task to your liking. 

 

Finally, you get a break, but you have to take your break in the area decided by your boss.  As with the inside tasks, the area for your break is limited and there are strict rules to follow.  After you have had 20 minutes to enjoy this break, you are sent to lunch.  Your lunch is chosen for you and consists of highly processed foods and is very carb heavy.  After lunch you get to take a nap, but you have to nap in a room where people are going in and out and talking the whole time.  You finally fall asleep after an hour and just as you fall into a deep sleep, the lights are turned on, you are woken up and told to get up right away. 

 

You are still groggy from your nap being cut short, but it is time to eat a snack, this snack may or may not be something you like, and you only get one serving either way. After snack, there is another meeting.  At this meeting the boss tells you she wants you to learn about time management.  You might not have a problem with time management but that doesn't matter.  For the next 45 minutes you will be doing activities to teach you about time management.  Some of these might be of interest to you, some might not but you have to do them all. During one of the tasks, you and a co-worker have a disagreement, as you are trying to work it out, the boss 

comes over and takes charge, they tell you and your co-worker how to proceed, neither of you feel satisfied with this outcome but you have no choice but to do what you are told. After you have finished all the time management tasks, you get another break and decide to embark on a project of your own choosing during this break but unfortunately, your break is not long enough for you to finish the project and it will not be saved for you to come back to. 

 

When you get back to the office, you are told you will need to work in another room with another group of co-workers.  Once in the new space you are assigned a project and must keep that project in the proper spot and cannot collaborate with anyone else unless they were specifically assigned the same project. This is how you spend the rest of your day, unless the boss decides to bring in more people and have you all watch a video that is unrelated to the work you are doing. 

 

Imagine that you do that same thing day in and day out.  Some of you may enjoy the predictability of these days but I'm sure most would feel frustrated at the lack of control you are given to finish your job to your standards. There is a good chance that you would not look forward to going to work or feel pride in what you are doing.  

 

Now imagine you go to work and are allowed long periods of time to work on what you want to work on.  If you have to stop for any reason, you get to save your work and come back to it later.  When you take a break, you get to decide how to spend that time and are given many options of activities and the only rule is to not hurt anyone and not break anything.  

 

After your break, you get a lunch that is made mostly of whole fruits and vegetables along with protein.  After lunch you go to a quiet, dim room to nap. Before you fall asleep there is a relaxing story and then calming music helps to drift off.  When you wake up the room is still dark, there may be a window open, but you can lay and relax until you are ready to get up. 

 

Once you are ready, you get to have an afternoon snack. The snacks are plentiful, and you get to have as much or as little as you want. 

 

Then you get to spend the rest of the day working on the project of your choice.  If you and a co-worker have a disagreement, your boss tells you to talk it out and come up with a solution you are both happy with.  You are free to go back and forth from project to project and to work with whoever you want.  

 

When you leave in the afternoon, there is a good chance you feel fulfilled and happy to have been able to do your job to your standard. 

 

Now replace the word boss with teacher and you see the difference between your typical early childhood education model and a true play-based model.  Play is the work of children; it is how they learn and how they gain the skills needed to function in life.  When we interrupt play to “teach” we are actually robbing children of the opportunity to learn. 

 

The Birdsall House way believes that given time and the proper environment, children will learn everything they need to be ready for academic learning. We don’t create lessons, we don’t tell the children what we think they need to learn, we trust them to explore and create their own lessons. 

 

 The Cost of Care

Hi everyone, I am sorry I have not blogged in a while, but we have been short staffed and I have been filling in. 

High turnover is a constant problem in childcare and this is especially harmful to infants and young children who need to develop strong relationships with their caregivers. 

One of the main reasons for this turnover is low wages and a lack of benefits. 

 As we were advertising for a new team member I got a lot of backlash about the low pay we were offering and how high our tuition rates are. I spent a lot of time crunching numbers to try and raise pay rates and not raise tuition. It can’t be done, at least not in a way that does not lower the quality of care we provide. 

I know that I have already written about advocacy but today I would like to share with you a tool that shows just how expensive it is to provide quality care.  

Please visit https://costofchildcare.org/index.html and enter your state, then enter what you would like to see when it comes to early child care. You will be surprised by how expensive it is to provide that care. 

We are a Group Home Center which is not on the list but it is similar to Family Home Care. I went there and entered Missouri and the only things I clicked on were to lower teacher child ratios and to increase teacher pay. I would need to charge $1471 a month to do that according to their calculations (which is close to what I had come up with.) I do not want to charge my families that much but I do want low ratios and to be able to recruit quality staff members and keep them. It seems like a no win situation and that is just the bare minimum for staff.  

When I clicked to pay staff the same as kindergarten teachers it raised the rates to $1724.  That is more than most people's mortgages. Not many people could afford to pay that.  When I got crazy and clicked to give staff health insurance and retirement plans, the needed monthly tuition went up to $2177 which is an unattainable amount for all but high income families. 

 

Unfortunately how the high cost of childcare is kept down is by paying minimum wage or just above, offering no benefits and having ridiculously high teacher child ratios. This leads to teacher burnout and high turnover which causes our children to not be able to build those important early trusting relationships. 

Not only do our children deserve better, so do the people caring for them.  Early Childhood Educators and caregivers deserve to make a living wage, they deserve to have the opportunity to plan for their future, they deserve healthcare and they deserve the respect given to all other educators.

Right now our representatives are deciding how to best support families and children.  Please go to  https://www.thinkbabies.org/take-action-american-families-plan/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=email_link&utm_content=baby_monitor_07012021&utm_campaign=Q4_2021_Policy_Center_Resources

And tell them that our children and the people who care for them deserve better. 

 Learning from our children. 

Over the years I have learned many things from my students.  I have learned dinosaur and animal facts, I have learned a great way to easily describe a tornado and many interesting facts about different religions and cultures. Recently I have learned that not only do the students add to my knowledge of facts, they also provide some amazing life lessons. 

#1 Love yourself

It was a beautiful spring day and the whole crew was outside. I was sitting with a baby on my lap and many of our students around me. 

One of the children said "Ms Kelly, who is your favorite person in the world?" 

I said that was a hard question and I was trying to come up with an answer. Some of the children were helping me try to figure out the right answer. 

We decided that it couldn't be one of them because I love them all.  It couldn't be one of my own children because I have three and love them all equally.  One of the children said it should be my granddaughter because I only have one grandchild.  

I was ready to settle on that answer when a very wise 7 year old said "Ms Kelly the answer should be you, it is very important to love yourself."  I could not argue with that answer and we then got into a great conversation about why self love is important. 

#2 Check in on your friends

Everyone was getting ready to go outside one morning, one of the children stopped to use the bathroom on the way out.  Another child got their coat on and was heading to the back door when she stopped at the bathroom door. I was prepared for a typical 3 year old interaction, perhaps she was going to ask when the other child was going to be finished or tell them that she needed in. 

I was not prepared for what she actually said.  

She opened the door just a crack and said "Are you doing ok?" to which the other child said "Yes, I am, thank you for asking." 

I guess you could say I learned two lessons from this encounter, lesson one was the importance of checking in with our friends to make sure they are okay and lesson two was to stop underestimating how kind our students are. 

 

Advocacy 

This is Missouri State childcare advocacy week and I thought I would share with you why I think advocacy is important.

In the last week I have added five children to our waitlist.  We currently have a waitlist that is almost double our legal occupancy.  While part of that is because we have an amazing program that provides loving care and encourages social emotional growth. We also provide a stimulating environment that encourages creativity, problem solving, and higher order thinking, along with creating a community of support for our families and staff. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think our greatness is the whole reason we have such a long waiting list. I think it also has to do with the lack of other amazing places in our area.    

Prier to Covid we were already in a childcare desert, for every 40 children who needed PreK care, there was ONE spot available.  In the last year, almost 40% of small centers in Missouri have closed their doors permanently.

I often hear from families who put their child on numerous waitlists, hoping to get in somewhere soon.

I have had parents tell me that the center or home they take their child to was not their first or even second choice, but they needed childcare and that place had a spot.  

This is not how it should be!

As a director I have struggled in the past to find quality staff and options for substitutes are nonexistent at times.  Our centers need to be well staffed and there needs to be consistency in care. Consistency allows for strong attachments to form and those attachments allow a child to feel safe.  Many centers are struggling to find quality staff and turnover in early childhood is very high, making it hard for children and families to form attachments with caregivers.

This is not how it should be!

We all know that the first three years are when most brain development happens and that the years 3 to 5 can either prepare a child for school and life, or not. Parents should have numerous high-quality centers/homes with open spots to choose from.  Some parents may want early academics (despite the evidence against it) and they should have many such places to choose from.  Other families may want a play-based center where the children are outside much of the day, like Birdsall House. There should be many high-quality play-based centers for families to choose from.

The only way that is going to happen is to invest in early childhood.

The only way investment will happen is through advocacy.  We need to advocate for investment in the quality centers we already have so that they can grow and serve more children.

Did you know that many centers require a teacher to have a degree and yet the average wage for childcare in Missouri is $11.29 an hour.  Many collages are finding fewer and fewer students who want to study early childhood education due to the low wages.

The only way to change this is to invest in early childhood.

The only way investment will happen is through advocacy. We need to advocate for investment in early childhood so educators can earn a livable wage without raising the burden on families for the cost.

Our families deserve to choose who they want to trust to help raise their children. Our caregivers deserve to not have to stress about how they are going to feed their own children.

This is why I think advocacy is important.  Advocacy can be as easy as signing a petition or filling in a form to send an email.  Please consider adding your voice to the many others advocating for our children.

If you would like to be an advocate for early childhood but do not know where to start, check out http://kidswinmissouri.org/ for more information about advocacy campaigns you can add your voice to.

Thank you for supporting and advocating for children and the people who care for them.

 Let them cry

It might surprise you to know that I do not mind walking into the center and hearing children cry, in fact I like it. 

If the children never cried, I would worry. 

I would worry that the children were not being allowed to experience conflict.

I would worry that the children were being placated to keep them happy.

I would worry that the children were getting the message that it was not okay to cry.

I remember once when I worked at a traditional center in the infant/toddler room and my director walked in and asked why one of the children was crying.  I replied that she was sad, and the director told me to make her stop because they were giving a tour and it did not look good.

As my past employers will tell you, I did not always follow orders.  This child was sad, she wanted something someone else had and despite us offering other toys, she was still sad and deserved to be allowed to express that sadness.  Fortunately, she had moved on by the time the tour came by, but I had been prepared to defend her right to cry if needed.

Not only do infants deserve and need to cry and express their emotions, so do toddlers and preschoolers and even adults. 

That baby that needed to cry became a toddler and preschooler who sometimes needed to cry.  Why would she need to cry you might ask, well, there are many reasons.

None of her friends wanted to play what she wanted to play.

One of her friends played with someone else.

Someone else was playing with the toy she wanted.

And so on, there are many reasons for a child to be sad, frustrated, or angry and they deserve to be able to express those emotion

As adults most of us don’t like it when we are upset, and someone tells us to “Calm Down” or says, “It’s Ok, don’t cry”. I know for me, when someone says those things, I feel like they are not really understanding or listening to me. Instead, I like it when my friend says, “I know that you are feeling sad and it you need to cry, then cry”. 

When we go to great effort to stop a child from crying by distraction or bribery, aren't we really telling them that it's not okay for them to be crying? That how they are feeling is wrong and they need to stop expressing it?  That the only emotion we are comfortable with is happiness?  What do they learn from that? 

It seems like we expect our children to control their emotions better than adults do, but when we do not allow them to express emotions, how are they supposed to learn to control them.

The crying child I mentioned earlier is now an amazing 8-year-old who is wise and empathetic, yes, she still cries but don’t we all. And that’s okay.