Notes from my writing journal.
Very early one morning I shared a taxi to the airport with a colleague, another early childhood teacher educator like me. We talked about what I would be writing about in my next book. I shared that it was about how teachers’ emotions affect their interactions with children, and especially with their challenging behaviors. She was silent for a moment and then said reflectively, “I often think that people who work with young children have been emotionally wounded when they were children themselves. It’s almost as if they have chosen the profession of early care and education because of that.” I thought about what she said and recognized that through the years as a teacher and professor, I certainly learned and came to understand much about my own childhood experiences and inner self through working with, observing and interacting with children and their families.
There is so much to say about emotional development. Indeed, lately everyone seems to be talking about social emotional development including the importance of social competence affecting academic achievement. Brain researchers explain that emotional memory stored in the brain during the first four or five years of life is un-erasable. That, in fact, the ways in which we interact with young children will affect them for the rest of their lives. The literature tells us that meaningful, loving relationships are crucial in young children’s emotional development. Behavior management and discipline seems to be such a popular topic. More than that, early childhood professionals seem starved for information about it. During my workshops or presentations about discipline at conferences or in-service trainings, I have hardly managed to complete my introduction when teachers of young children are anxious for solutions and answers, strategies and prescriptions, and for me to tell them exactly what to do when a child bites, hits, refuses to clean up, answers back, “throws” a tantrum, or does not follow directions. So many express feeling helpless or frustrated with challenging behaviors of young children in their classrooms or child care settings. Most often I start off with asking participants or students to describe how they were disciplined as young children. We write the list of punishments on the board or overhead and discover that the majority of attendees have experienced pain or humiliation when they were young children. Parents have slapped, pinched, yelled at, or threatened them. They express feeling resentment. After these sessions over and over again I cannot help but wonder how those earliest memories have affected the very people who will be disciplining the children in their care.
If, suddenly, you don't hear from me regularly on this blog ... this is where I will be ... writing it down ...
It's about time! Isn't it Liz?
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