HEAD START®

Infant and Toddler Transitions

Training Guides for the Head Start Learning Community

Table of Contents | Informational Resources: Contents | Digest | Program Profiles | Resources

Digests

Infants and Toddler Identity Formation | Building a Positive Staff-Parent Relationship in the Context on the Home | Dancing with Your Baby | Cultural Issues in Early Care | Effective Infant Toddler Transitions | Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP)

infant and toddler identity formation

Recent research has found that 23 percent of children younger than 1 year of age, 33 percent of 1-year-olds, 38 percent of 2-year-olds, and 50 percent of 3-year-olds are cared for outside their homes by someone other than their parents. This increase in the number of infants and toddlers in early childhood programs has pushed the issue of quality infant and toddler programming to the forefront of attention. Issues such as group sizes, adult-to-child ratios, and appropriate environments have often been studied by researchers. However, little attention has been given to the effect of infant and toddler care on a child's formation of identity.

This issue of identity formation is especially important because an integral part on infant and toddler development is children's developing a sense of self. When infants and toddlers attend early childhood programs, teachers greatly influence their formation of identity. Infants observe teachers in a variety of situations, including how they act toward others and how they express emotions. It is not a single reaction that has an impact, but rather the repeated give-and-take interactions that occur between teacher and child.

The lessons learned from these early relationships become incorporated into a child's sense of self. The lessons may tell a child:

• What to fear

• Which of his behaviors are seen as appropriate.

• How her cues are received and acted upon.

• How successful he is at getting his needs met by others.

• Which emotions are safe to express.

• How interesting she is.

Stern (1985) concludes that when teachers are attuned to infants and toddlers—that is, when a teacher communicates to a baby that she understands his feelings and knows the right way to respond—children learn that they are powerful and that they can have a positive effect on their environment. Conversely, when teachers consistently misinterpret children's signals and do not respond in accordance with their desires, children may learn that they do not have positive control over their world.

Studies have found that when smaller and larger groups are compared, teachers in safe environments with fewer children smile more often at the children and are more willing to let them explore. In essence, such teachers are more finely attuned to the children.

Other policies to promote identity formation should also be adopted when creating infant programs. Key polices are listed below.

Assigning a Primary Teacher to Each Infant

When a child has one teacher with whom she can form a secure relationship, the child and the teacher are more finely attuned to each other's rhythms. It is also important that all teachers in the program work closely as a team so that when one teacher is absent, infants have secondary attachments on which to rely.

Continuity of Care

When children change teachers two and three times during their first 36 months, they do not have a chance to form strong bonds with any one particular teacher. When infants, toddlers, and teachers must continually learn to read and interpret the signals of new people, both children and teachers are less attuned to each other. When transitions are minimized, teachers and children form stronger, longer lasting bonds that encourage strong identity formation.

Serving Infants in Small Groups

Keeping groups small allows more intimate contact between teachers and children. Teachers are better able to read infants' cues from afar, make eye contact, and provide emotional support from a distance. They are more available in children need to return to them for emotional nurturing.

Facilitating Infants' Interests and Natural Curiosity

Teachers need to act as facilitators and help infants explore and direct their own learning. Infants and toddlers learn about physical properties by mouthing, banging, and shaking toys. Teachers who label the sounds, objects and feelings that infants experience are doing far more to help the children gain an understanding of themselves as learners than teachers who execute a rigid, preplanned curriculum.

Cultural Continuity Between Home and Program

Program experiences for children need to be consistent with what families practice at home. Conversations between families and teachers help create this continuity. When a teacher disregards what happens at home, the infant gets a message that something is wrong with what her family does. Even better for the child's development of a sense of self is having an adult with a cultural background similar to the child's as one of his teachers in his early childhood program.

Adapted with the permission from J. Ronald Lally, "The Impact of Child Care Polices and Practices on Infant/Toddler Identity Formation," Young Children, Vol. 51, No. 1, November 1995, 58-67.

Building a Positive Staff-Parent Relationship in the Context of the Home

Families and children all have the opportunity to benefit from strong parent-staff relationships. When families are comfortable with staff, they are better able to use the home-visiting experience to enrich their lives with their children. The home-visiting relationship helps families to better understand their children's development and to use this information to strengthen their own parenting practices.

What are key ingredients to a positive home-visiting staff-parent relationship?

The staff-parent relationship is strengthened when:

• Parents feel the staff's genuine concern and caring during the home visit.

• Parents are the decision makers.

• The home-visiting staff:

  • Enjoys the family's child

  • Is warm and makes the parents feel comfortable, as if they were relating to a friend.

  • Actively listens to whatever the parents choose to discuss.

  • Is nonjudgemental and validating, praising the parents' actions when appropriate

What steps can home-visiting staff take to maintain and promote a positive relationship with parents?

Staff can use several communication techniques to maintain a strong working relationship. Some of these include:

• Using an individual approach with each family

• Sharing information about development

• Providing empathetic listening and support

• Affirming and describing the positive parent interactions they observe

• Implementing joint problem solving

• Balancing interaction with both parents and children

• Making all suggestions in a sensitive manner

The first home visit has the potential to set the tone for the entire staff-parent relationship. Four central elements need to be clarified during this first visit. When these items are discussed up front, confusion in less likely to occur later in the relationship.

1. Expectations need to be shared and discussed. Home-visiting staff should ask parents what their expectations for their infant are and how they would like to use their time during the home visit.

2. Staff need to understand the home-visiting plan. This understanding helps guide the activities that are to be implemented in a family's home.

3. Families and staff need to clarify their roles. Parents need to understand that they are experts in their child's development and active participants in the home visit. Home-visiting staff need to share information on the child's development and offer strategies for parents to implement on a daily basis.

4. Staff need to understand that they are working in the family's setting and respect their space and home. Home-visiting staff should ask parents' permission before holding a child and should enter rooms only when they are invited.

If these guidelines are followed, a positive, personal parent-staff relationship should develop, which will be beneficial to all: parents, children, and home-visiting staff.

Adapted with permission from Carol S. Klass, "The Home Visitor-Parent Relationship: The Linchpin of Home Visiting," ZERO TO THREE, Vol. 17, Nov. 4, February/March 1997, 1, 3-9.

Dancing with Your Baby

Nurturing, responsive, respectful relationships help babies develop feelings of trust and security and a strong sense of identity. Each baby is unique in temperament, behavior style, and pattern of development. Infant development is a sequence of steps along a continuum. When adults know this, they can develop a keen understanding of times when infants have difficulty adjusting and adapting to transitions and changes. Part of developing this understanding is learning how to dance with a baby by observing, tuning into, and responding to cues. The information below is a guide to getting started.

Become Partners

Infants need more than adequate food, shelter, warmth, safety, cleanliness. They need dance partners who know when to lead and when to follow their cues.

Carefully Look and Listen

• Listen to and note the differences in cries signaling hunger, discomfort, a need to be cuddled, and boredom

• Notice and interpret the baby's body language—is the baby stiff, tense, relaxed, smiling, or frowning?

• Watch how the baby responds to various routines and activities

• Closely observe the baby to get a feel for her unique temperament.

Gather Information about Development

• Learn about the social, emotional, intellectual, and physical development of infants and toddlers

• Talk with other parents and staff to identify developmental milestones

• Use the information you gather to develop specific ways of supporting a baby's unique pace of growth.

• Know the signs of transition for your child's next developmental stage.

Dance with Your Baby

• Adjust and adapt your rhythms to match your rhythms. Sometimes you will lead and sometimes you will follow.

• When your baby talks to you, repeat the same sounds he makes, then pause and give him time to respond.

• Follow your baby's cues about how much or how little help she needs and when she needs help.

• Notice your baby's cues about how much or how little help she needs and when she needs help.

• Notice your baby's reactions to new situations—for example, when the dance is too fast or too difficult.

• Lure your baby into new experiences and match new routines with familiar ones.

• Respect your baby's need to explore and discover.

• Use words, gestures, and body language to share your delight with your baby.

Adapted with permission from Alice Sterling Honig, "Dancing with Your Baby," Dimensions of Early Childhood, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring 1992, 11-17.

Cultural Issues in Early Care

Multicultural Perspectives

Many factors affect the ease (or difficulty) experienced by individual children and families during transitions. Caregiving practices are often grounded in cultural values, beliefs, and experiences. Continuous relationships and consistency of care are important issues that surface during transitions. Being able to see a family's expectations and preferences from a cultural perspective and having the ability to communicate effectively about cultural variations can help a relationship begin on a respectful note.

Examples of Inconsistency in Cross-Cultural Situations

A baby who has never slept alone cries when put in a crib in a dark room separate from the room where activity is going on. That same baby protests when she in on the floor by herself. Her mother explains that she is used to being held. Should you do what you believe is good for babies or what she is used to?

A toddler faced with finger food refuses to pick it up. The caregiver discovers that his family teachers its children never to touch their food. They spoon-feed their children past toddlerhood. Although the caregiver sees the boy as helpless, the family sees him as well trained. If the caregiver continues to offer the toddler finger food, he will face a serious contradiction about he is supposed to do. What are some solutions to this problem?

Conflicting Goals

The first step to solving any cultural conflict is to understand the family's perspective as it relates to its goals. If the family's goals is the opposite of the program's goal, a quick solution is unlikely. Most U.S. child care programs emphasize independence and individuality, which reflects the values of the dominant culture. However, some cultures do not make these values a priority and a may even consider them problematic. Children in these cultures are not trained to be independent individuals because the family believes such training gets in the way of promoting close, long-lasting relationships. Family members place a higher priority on interdependence and forming connections that they do on independence. Their child-rearing practices are designed to create closeness and reliance on one another. Members on these families may try to delay what the dominant culture considers a natural drive toward independence by focusing on meeting their children's current needs for dependence and nurturing. They recognize that the children will eventually become independent, and they feel no need to hasten that development. They are less interested in promoting self-sufficiency that in ensuring that the family ties they are developing are strong enough to last a lifetime.

Conflicting Practices

It is important to recognize that unless the family has made a decision to take on a new culture, the parental child-rearing practices are designed to prepare children for adulthood in the family's culture. When a child comes into the program, the first objective of the caregiver must be to find out the family's practices and how these practices relate to family goals. Such knowledge can be gained by observing the parent and child together, as well as by talking about practices and goals. Understanding takes a lot of communication.

Broader Definition

When cultural sensitivity is defined in the broad context of infant caregiving, discussions of cultural factors in child development can be included as a part of all staff and parent training sessions, program practices, and reflective supervision. This approach provides many opportunities for dialogues that begin to blend shared points of view and prompt adults to act responsibly and sensitively to differing practices.

Benefits for Children

Culturally responsive care is likely to have positive influences on the development of self-esteem, social competence, language, and cognitive abilities. Children's developing sense of self is closely connected with their cultural identity.

By observing a family's interactions with its child in his own environment and by learning about a child's daily routines and family's goals for its child's development, staff can better provide the consistency that is crucial to the child's growth and development. Working toward this goal helps create more harmony between cultural family practices and program practices and reduces the novelty and strangeness that a child may experience during transitions.

Strategies

For families and staff to work together in partnership for the benefit of children, it is necessary for each to understand and discuss their points of view. The following reflective strategies can help caring adults step back, observe, discuss, and resolve differing practices.

• Reflect on infant and toddler routines from a comparative child development perspective.

• Shift from a universal to a cultural view of child development and care.

• Confront preconceived beliefs about diverse families.

• Consider multiple options in infant and toddler rearing.

• Be accepting of different practices and be creative in resolving conflicts.

Adapted in part, with permission, from Navaz-Peshotan Bhavnagri and Janet Gonzalez-Mena and from the Association for Childhood Education International, from Navaz-Peshotan Bhavnagri and Janet Gonzalez-Mena, "The Cultural Context on Infant Caregiving," Childhood Education, Fall 1997, 2-8. 1997 by the Association for Childhood Education International.

Also adapted in part, with permission, from Janet Gonzalez-Mena and Judith K. Bernhard and from the Canadian Child Care Federation, from Janet Gonzalez-Mena and Judith K. Bernhard, "A Call for Cultural and Linguistic Continuity," Interaction, Summer 1998.

Effective Infant Toddler Transitions

Climbing a Mountain

Developmental transitions of infants and toddlers can be compared with learning how to climb a mountain with help of an expert guide. The familiar adult is the expert for the infant or toddler, providing the emotional support ropes and the sure footing of a good attachment relationship. The transition process described here was practiced very successfully at the University of Pittsburgh Child Development Center.

Beginning the Ascent

The child's primary teacher accompanied the infant as he moved up from the infant group to the toddler group. The transition took place gradually over a 4- to 6-week period. During this period, the child's day began in the infant room. After breakfast, the child went with the primary caregiver for brief visits to the toddler room. The visitors were greeted warmly by the toddlers group's staff. The infant was somewhat familiar with the staff because he had some weekly casual contact in places like the gym.

The visitors staying in the toddler room for about a half-hour each day for the first few visits. Gradually, the visits were lengthened to about an hour. During the visits, the infant and the expert explored the room together. Late in the first week, the toddler group's staff began to seek interaction with the young visitor (after the infant had time to view the staff from afar). Up until that point, contact had occurred out of the infant's close proximity to the new adults. As these interactions increased, the infant group's teacher remained nearby or in view, according to the needs of the child. The subtly shift from one trustworthy adult to another had begun.

A Little Higher

During the second week, the child gradually stayed 2½ to 3 hours (until just before lunch). The infant's teacher and the toddler group's staff shared the role of nurturing expert. The infant's teacher made sure the before she left the room, she let the child know that she would return to take him back to the infant room for lunch. The toddler group's staff always let the infant know that they were available to him when his teacher left the room.

In the infant became too upset to be comforted by the new adult, the infant's expert was called to return to the toddler room for a while and eventually took the infant back to the infant room. The next day the transition process continued.

Halfway There

From the beginning to the end of the transition, there was a steady flow of communication with the infants' parents, and they were encouraged to visit the new room without their child. In the middle of the transition process (the third week), the child often pulled his parents in the direction of the toddler room on entering the building. But until the transition process was complete, the parents were asked to keep the original routine of dropping their child off in the infant room. When the child had become securely attached to the toddler group's staff, it was easier for him to separate from his parents.

Reaching the Top

In the fourth week, the child began to take naps in the new room, and after nap time returned to the infant room. By the fifth or sixth week, the new toddler had completed the transition—had reached the peak of the mountain. Each day began and ended in the toddler room. This transition process was individualized to meet the needs of the child and altered when there were trouble spots.

Conclusion

This gradual transition process protected and nourished the child's psychosocial development. Small incremental steps were included that allowed the child to feel more comfortable and confident about making the transition. This effective practice was continued as the toddler transitioned from the toddler room to preschool. Policies and practices like the ones described help children build positive coping skills.

Adapted with permission from Daniel, Jerlean E., "Infants to Toddlers: Qualities of Effective Transitions," Young Children, Vol. 48, No. 6, September 1993, 16-21.

For More Information

Balaban, N. 1992. "The Role of the Child Care Professional in Caring for Infants, Toddlers, and Their Families," Young Children, 47(5), 66-71.

Endsley, R., and P. Minish. 1991. "Parent-Staff Communication in Day Care Centers during Morning and Afternoon Transitions," Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(2), 119-135.

Gonzalez-Mena, J. 1986. "Toddlers: What to Expect," Young Children, 42(1), 47-51.

Gottschall, S. 1989. "Understanding and Accepting Separation Feelings," Young Children, 44(6), 11-16.

Jervis, K., ed. 1984. Separation. Washington, D.C.: NAEYC.

Raikes, H. 1993. "Relationship Duration in Infant Care: Time with a High-Ability Teacher and Infant-Teacher Attachment," Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 8(3), 309-325.

Whitebook, M., and R.C. Granger. 1989. "'Mommy, Who's Going to Be My Teacher Today?' Assessing Teacher Turnover," Young Children, 44(4), 11-14.

Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP)

What Is an IFSP?

An Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) is an ongoing written service plan for the whole family of a child with special needs from birth to age 3. The goal of the IFSP is to define the family's strengths and needs as they relate to the child's development. It clarifies goals that the family, child, and early intervention team can work toward.

Because a family's priorities can change, the IFSP is a working, flexible document. Its focus is to help provide families with support and encourage them to seek community resources.

What Principles Guide the IFSP?

The guiding principles of the IFSP are:

• A child's greatest resource is his family.

• A baby's needs are closely tied to the needs of her family.

• The best way to support children and meet their needs is to support and build on the strengths of their family.

What Are the Elements of an IFSP?

Anything that concerns the family can be outlined in the IFSP. Elements of the plan include:

• Developmental information. This section can include the child's medical history, diagnoses, and medications, as well as strengths and challenges in the development of the following skills: fine and gross motor, communication, social-emotional, self-help, cognitive, and play.

• Family interest and concerns. This section identifies services that the family may be interested in, such as financial, housing, transportation, health, employment, legal, social, early intervention, and therapy.

• Timeline. This section describes, in terms of months, when the family would like events in the child's development to occur and when services should be delivered. Providers, cost, and major outcomes to be achieved by the child and the family can be identified in the plan.

• Preschool transition plan. This section identifies the school district the child resides in, the district contact person, and a plan of action for how and when the transition to preschool services will take place.

Who Prepares the IFSP?

A service coordinator generally initiates the IFSP process and works with the family to complete the plan as the child develops from birth to age 3. Involvement of other team members will depend on the needs of the young child. Other team members may include medical staff, therapists, child development specialists, social workers, and others. The parents are the most important members of the IFSP team and are the final decision makers regarding the level and type of intervention services desired.

Adapted from the Web site of Resources for Young Children & Families, Inc. (http://www.rcf.org). Also adapted from A Parent's Guide: Accessing Programs For Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers with Disabilities (Washington, DC: The National Information Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities, 1994), p. 4.