THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF QUALITY IN ECEC SERVICES: A Child - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

CCCH Professional Development Seminar Why quality matters: service delivery and children’s wellbeing Melbourne Convention Centre, 27 th November 2013 Centre for Community Child Health THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF QUALITY IN ECEC SERVICES: A Child Developmental Perspective Tim Moore Centre for Community Child Health Murdoch Children’s Research Institute The Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne

OUTLINE • Early childhood development • Key factors that promote development • What kind of relationships do children need? • What kind of experiences do children need? • The ‘what’ and ‘how’ of working with children • Individualisation and catering for diversity • Conclusions and implications for practice Centre for Community Child Health

NEW LEARNINGS ABOUT CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND WELL-BEING • There has been an explosion of new knowledge regarding the nature, development and functioning of the brain as the result of the development of new technologies for studying the brain. This has led to new insights into the neurobiology of interpersonal relationships. • The importance of the early years for neurological development – developmental vulnerabilities during pregnancy and in early relationships • The previously unsuspected extent of neuroplasticity • The previously unacknowledged role of emotions • Shift from ‘left brain conscious cognition to right brain unconscious affect’ - the vindication of Freud’s insights regarding the role of the unconscious • The long term effects of early experiences / relationships Centre for Community Child Health

HOW CHILDREN DEVELOP • The basic foundations for future development are laid down during the prenatal and early childhood years • Prenatal development plays a critical role in shaping aspects of development. • Children learn from birth – wherever they are, there is an informal ‘curriculum’ operating • Children’s l earning and development are cumulative, with later development building upon earlier development. • Discrepancies between children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds emerge early, and progressively widen, with advantages and disadvantages accumulating throughout life Centre for Community Child Health

HOW CHILDREN DEVELOP (cont) • Children's emotional development is built into the architecture of their brains - emotional development begins early in life, is a critical aspect of the development of overall brain architecture, and has enormous consequences over the course of a lifetime. • Children learn through ‘massive practice’ of existing skills, repeating them thousands of times before transitioning to higher developmental levels • Children’s development is shaped by the social and physical environments in which they spend their time Centre for Community Child Health

KEY FACTORS THAT PROMOTE DEVELOPMENT • Relationships are the medium through which young children learn the skills that enable them to become fully participating members of society. • Relationships change brains. Our brains constantly communicate with each other through unconscious or subconscious neurobiological pathways of which we are unaware. We are biologically primed to read others’ minds. • The environments in which young children spend their time provide opportunities and experiences that shape development. In particular, the nature and quality of the home learning environments are important influences on children’s learning and development . Centre for Community Child Health

KEY FACTORS THAT PROMOTE DEVELOPMENT (cont) • Children learn from the environments in which they spend their time – wherever they go, a curriculum operates, whether it is overt (EYLF/VEYLDF) or covert • The quality of the relationships and the range of experiences provided in each of these settings are what shape children’s development and determine their well - being • The emotional health of young children — or the absence of it — is closely tied to the social and emotional characteristics of the environments in which they live Centre for Community Child Health

‘ There are many well-trodden pathways to misery. People may choose to eat too much or too little, drink too much alcohol, react to other people without thinking, fail to have empathy for others, fall ill, make unreasonable emotional demands, become depressed, attack others physically, and so on, largely because their capacity to manage their own feelings has been impaired by their poorly developed emotional systems.’ (Gerhardt, 2004)

WHAT KIND OF RELATIONSHIPS DO CHILDREN NEED? Centre for Community Child Health

• The key elements of developmental caregiving involve being warm, responsive, encouraging, and conversational • These developmental caregiving behaviours promote three important outcomes in children’s early development – secure attachment, confident exploration, and competent communication • These three outcomes are the Lori A. Roggman, Lisa K. Boyce and Mark S. Innocenti foundations of subsequent social- (2008). Developmental emotional, cognitive and language Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood development Practitioners. Baltimore, Maryland: Paul H. Brookes.

THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS Centre for Community Child Health

NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS Our feelings and emotions are communicated to others in conscious and unconscious ways • Conscious communication of feelings is done by telling others what we feel • Our ability to do this effectively depends upon our ‘emotional intelligence’, that is, our ability to register and articulate our feelings • Children benefit when we express our feelings directly, simply, and in non-threatening ways: they want to know not only what their parents think, but also how they feel • When we express our emotions, our children learn what is important to us as well as witnessing a model for the healthy expression of emotion Centre for Community Child Health

NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS (cont ) ● Unconscious communication of feelings is done nonverbally through facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, gestures, posture, and the timing and intensity of response ● We are constantly communicating our feelings in these unconscious ways, and constantly (albeit unconsciously) registering such expressions in others ● Tuning to each other's internal states links us in a state of emotional resonance that enables each person to ‘feel felt’ by the other ● Neurological and neurochemical processes make this possible Centre for Community Child Health

CORTICAL AND SUBCORTICAL PATHWAYS: THE ‘HIGH ROAD’ AND THE ‘LOW ROAD’ We take in information about others via two routes: • The low road involves subcortical neural circuitry that operates beneath our awareness, automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed. Most of what we do seems to be piloted by massive neural networks operating via the low road – particularly in our emotional life. • The high road , in contrast, runs through cortical neural systems that work more methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of the high road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which the low road denies us. Centre for Community Child Health

SIGNIFICANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS People learn how to be with others by experiencing how others are with them – this is how one’s views and feelings (internal models) of relationships are formed and how they may be modified. Therefore, how parents are with their babies (warm, sensitive, responsive, consistent, available) is as important as what they do (feed, change, soothe, protect, teach). Similarly, how professionals are with parents (respectful, attentive, consistent, available) is as important as what they do (inform, support, guide, refer, counsel).’ Gowen and Nebrig (2001)

RESPONSES THAT UNDERMINE THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE There are three types of adult responses that undermine the development of emotional development: • Dismissive responses – disregarding, ignoring or trivialising children’s negative emotions • Disapproving responses – being critical of children’s displays of emotion, reprimanding or punishing them • Laissez-faire responses – accepting children’s emotions and empathising with them, but failing to offer guidance or set limits on the children’s behaviour Gottman (1997) Centre for Community Child Health

EFFECTS OF NEGLECT Extensive biological and developmental research over the past 30 years has generated substantial evidence that young children who experience severe deprivation or significant neglect — defined broadly as the ongoing disruption or significant absence of caregiver responsiveness — bear the burdens of a range of adverse consequences. Indeed, deprivation or neglect can cause more harm to a young child’s development than overt physical abuse, including subsequent cognitive delays, impairments in executive functioning, and disruptions of the body’s stress response. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2012 )

WHAT KIND OF EXPERIENCES DO CHILDREN NEED Centre for Community Child Health