Know

Welcoming Each Child and Family

Where do you feel welcomed? What happens in a place that makes you feel welcome?  

Spend a few seconds thinking about the two questions above. Then consider all the things you do in your daily work to make preschool children and their families feel welcome in your classroom and program. How do you greet children and families in the morning and when it’s time to go home? How do you ensure that preschoolers feel welcome, learn, and develop while having fun? How do you comfort them when they seem upset or miss their loved ones? How do you ensure that families feel welcome and supported?

Successful preschool teachers create positive, welcoming environments for the children and families they work with and strive for excellence in their interactions with others. The most important aspects of your work are the relationships you create and nurture with children, families, and colleagues. These relationships form over time and require ongoing effort and commitment. Collaborating with others is a big part of your work, and whether you are a new or a seasoned preschool teacher, your success and effectiveness is greatly dependent upon how well you work with others. Whether you are engaging with children, families, colleagues, or supervisors, nurturing all of these relationships early on is critical to your success.

Preschool children’s development happens so quickly. When families and teachers work together, communicate, and share what is observed and experienced, opportunities are created for better understanding and supporting this rapid time of developmental growth. Asking questions, communicating, and listening with families helps support continuity of care between children’s home and the care setting.

Understanding the children in your care and child development is essential in your role as a preschool teacher. You can find extensive information and further details on each of the developmental domains in domain specific courses within the Virtual Lab School (e.g., Cognitive Development, Physical Development, Social & Emotional Development), as well as strategies and practical ideas on how to promote optimal growth. You should refer to these courses for comprehensive information about preschool children’s development. Along with child development, knowledge about topics in courses such as Safe Environments, Learning Environments, Healthy Environments, Positive Guidance, Child Abuse, and Family Engagement will strengthen your competence and enable you to positively impact the lives of children and families you engage with. Greater outcomes in children’s development are achieved when children in your care are healthy, emotionally secure, and socially connected. These outcomes, however, cannot be achieved unless you put preschoolers’ families and home cultures at the forefront of your work.

When engaging with families of children with special learning needs, you should work with your T&CS and administrator to ensure that you have the resources and supports you need. You should work collaboratively with the T&CS, the administrator, and the child’s family members to be sure that a preschooler’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) outcomes are addressed (if appropriate) in your classroom and program. Successful inclusion of children with disabilities requires careful planning, intentional teaching, and ongoing communication among all team members. Building these kinds of collaborative relationships takes time and commitment but has meaningful outcomes on your practice.

You will work with your T&CS and administrator to ensure that families are welcomed and supported at all times in your classroom and program. Just as you care about how preschool children in your care are welcomed, you should also pay attention to how families are included in your daily work, not only at drop-off and pick-up time, but throughout their child’s day. In doing so, consider the following:

• Ask family members how they would like to be involved in your classroom and remind them that they are important to you.
• Respect each child in your care and their family. Acknowledge diversity and individual differences in growth, background, values, and beliefs.
• Share information with families about the work you do with their preschool children and, if needed, explain why or how you do specific things in certain ways.
• Families can choose to be involved in various ways. For military families, it is critical to have flexibility in how they are able to participate.
• When families volunteer to be in your classroom, they need to have clear directions, a purpose, and they need to know what the expectations are for them.
• Family members want to have meaningful conversations about their child’s experiences, interests, and successes.  Make sure you keep them updated about their child’s growth regularly. Acknowledge all the great things preschool children do on a daily basis and share those with their families often! Ongoing communication and collaboration creates a foundation for acceptance and trust that benefits everyone.
• All families have strengths and all families experience their own different challenges. Focus on each family’s strengths and build on those.

Introducing Family-Centered Practice

Because families are central to their child’s development, particularly when it comes to the early childhood years, they are partners, active participants, and decision-makers in their children’s education process. As a result, family-centered practice is considered one of the indicators of quality in early childhood education, programs, and services. At the heart of family-centered practice is the belief that families are the most important decision-makers in a child’s life (Sandall, Hemmeter, Smith, & McLean, 2005).

Family-centered practice also means that you understand the important effect all family members have on each other and on their preschool child. Each family member affects one another, and the ways in which their family functions as a whole. All family members are interconnected. From our families, we learn skills that enable us to engage in school and the workplace, and how we should interact with others to form relationships.

When considering family-centered practice, you are viewing the children in your care as part of a larger system; you are viewing family members as a whole. You become aware of and sensitive to, the interactions and relationships that take place within the family, as well as how outside interactions and supports affect them. In an effort to maintain relationships and to work effectively together, you learn to respect and understand the characteristics of each family and its support system. You can also consider the characteristics and stressors that may impact a family’s involvement. What may affect one family member can impact all family members. A family is a complex system in which no one member can be viewed in isolation.

Family-centered practice is an umbrella term that encompasses the beliefs and actions of people in your program. Consider this table:

Making an effort to understand preschool children and their families can create opportunities for you to better support the young children in your care.

Honoring Diversity in Families

Some very important learning in the preschool years relates to culture. Preschoolers learn new words, ways of interacting with others, how to communicate, and how to play — all things influenced by culture. Culture refers to the shared experiences and history of different groups of people. Cultural differences may include differences in views of family and community, expectations of children, roles of parents, and value placed on education.

Culture is a significant factor in the ways families raise their children and how you, as a preschool teacher, provide care for young children. Examine your own cultural experiences and consider how these experiences affect your practice with preschoolers and families. Each teacher brings specific values, beliefs, and assumptions about child rearing and development to their work. In almost every type of child care routine you perform, your values about it were shaped by your own childhood and through your training. As you work with preschool children and their families, it is important to recognize your values and beliefs and the ways in which they are communicated. For example, a parent might expect a preschooler to never have a toileting accident, while you believe that toileting accidents do happen occasionally.

Sometimes, you might feel unsure about how to care for a preschool child or how to engage families who have very different experiences and cultures, including those who speak an unfamiliar language or who have unfamiliar religious customs. You can acknowledge differences and demonstrate an interest in the family as an effort to build relationships and learn ways to better support the children in your care. For example, you can learn how families view sleep habits, which may be influenced by culture and affects development. However, no mater the culture most all children will still fall within the given range on the developmental continuum; a family’s culture does not indicate that a child will be delayed developmentally. When individual differences are viewed through the lens of culture, respectful conversations can lead to agreement in how practices can be supported in the early care and learning environment.

Early care and learning settings provide an environment in which adults and children can learn about, and honor, differences in values, beliefs, and perceptions. Learning one’s culture occurs primarily within the family; however, in early care and learning environments, preschool children also learn about culture and experience relationships that influence their sense of self and their sense of who they will become.

To help children develop this sense of who they are and who they will become, you must honor and celebrate the diversity of families. Diversity exists in a variety of dimensions, including:

• Composition (who is a member of the family)
• Race and ethnicity
• Language
• Socioeconomic status
• Sexual orientation
• Ability or disability
• Educational background
• Values and traditions
• Child-rearing practices

Being a responsive teacher means that you demonstrate sensitivity and consideration for the multiple backgrounds, experiences, values, and contexts in which children and families live.

Being a responsive teacher also means that you are always professional and ethical when working with families. In doing that, you should practice the following:

• Keep information about children and their families confidential. This refers to reviewing child and family records, having conversations with other teachers in your program or in the community, or engaging in conversations with other people you know in the community.
• When you know confidential information about a child or family, use that information to help them and do not pass judgement on them.
• If individuals ask you for confidential information about children or families in your classroom or program, refer them to your T&CS or administrator.

Do

There is a lot you can do to show that you value the families of preschool children in your program. Consider the following guidelines that reflect family-centered practice, and then think about how you can use these guidelines in your work with children and families.

• Recognize the family as the constant in the child’s life and that teachers and service systems may come and go.
• Acknowledge that families know their children best, and learn to view them as partners and collaborators in your work. Reach out to them and invite their input.
• Facilitate collaboration between families and professionals.
• Encourage family-to-family support and networking.
• Honor and respect family diversity in all dimensions (cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, spiritual, socioeconomic, or in terms of family members’ sexual orientations). You may do this by:
  • Asking families about their home language, sharing key phrases they use at home.
  • Demonstrating genuine interest in each child and family you work with and making an effort to get to know them.
  • Having family information and children’s books in the languages of each family.
  • Inviting families to visit your classroom and program and sing songs, tell stories, and show books or pictures that demonstrate their culture, and, for preschoolers, introduce culturally specific foods.
  • Observing how a family interacts with their child.  
  • Asking families to create a family or neighborhood storybook.
  • Meeting regularly with families to learn about their hopes, dreams and goals for their child.