This lesson introduces the concept of positive guidance and its critical importance in a relationship-based family child care home. You will learn how one’s beliefs about adult-child relationships, knowledge of developmentally appropriate practice, family practices, and cultural context influence beliefs about child guidance. This lesson includes an introduction to Gartrell’s six practices for positive guidance. You will learn that in your role as a family child care provider, your daily interactions are key to establishing partnerships with children and families. You can effectively implement developmentally appropriate, positive child guidance principles in daily care routines and activities.

This lesson will help you understand children’s social and emotional development as a part of relationship-based care that matches children’s developmental needs. Understanding children’s social and emotional development across various ages helps you provide age-appropriate positive guidance.

In this lesson, you will learn that by keeping a consistent routine and schedule, planning interesting and developmentally appropriate activities, and relying on a few simple rules, you can provide an environment that promotes positive social interactions among children and providers. This lesson addresses some of the advantages and challenges to serving mixed-age groups of children in family child care. Lastly, you will also be provided an opportunity to reflect on your current family child care environment as a strategy for promoting positive child outcomes.

In this lesson, you will learn about addressing children’s challenging behavior. The resources include ways to understand challenging behavior, document behavior to understand patterns that may be taking place, unique situations that may affect the behavior of children of military personnel, and the importance of community-based resources that assist providers and families in addressing challenging behavior.