Early Childhood Staff Training

By the time children reach kindergarten, their level of emotional intelligence—not IQ or cognitive intelligence—can already predict how well they will perform in academic and employment settings, and even whether they will have trouble with the law in the future. If emotional intelligence in kindergarten has such a strong link to how successful children will be in their future, this means that the early childhood years are essential to ensuring that emotional intelligence develops in time to create a solid foundation for future success in academic, career and social settings.

Young children are notorious for having a vivid imagination. They see spaceships where adults see cardboard boxes, and dinosaurs where an adult sees the neighbor’s dog. A child’s imagination can be a wonderful thing. But, when a child’s imagination fuels fears and worries about attending or participating in parts of a child care program, this creates big problems for parents who may be hesitant to separate from a child and even more problems for the child care provider who has to calm the fears of the child and the now worried parent.

Serving in the field of child care comes with the responsibility to help protect and safeguard the well-being of the children in your care. While most of the daily duties of a child care professional focus on keeping children safe in-the-moment, another facet of the profession is being placed in the position of reporting suspected child maltreatment, which can sometimes be a difficult task for child care professionals who have a close relationship with the child and the child’s family (who may or may not be the alleged perpetrator of the maltreatment).

Preschool-aged children are expelled at an exponentially higher than that in K-12 education. Behavioral concerns such as aggression, defiance and poor attention span cause difficulties in the early childhood environment and can lead to burnout of the caregiver, mutual resentment between the child, family and the child care professional and ultimately the expulsion of the preschooler.

As a child care professional, you spend your days providing the solid foundation that you know these kids need to be successful in kindergarten. But you worry about some of the kids in your care because you know they don’t have the appropriate social skills to succeed in your program and you worry about what will happen to them when they head off to kindergarten.

As a child care professional, you’ve no doubt run into a strong-willed child who has made your job incredibly challenging. Spending time with a strong-willed child each day is emotionally and intellectually draining as it is common for most interactions to become argumentative and many of the traditional techniques for behavior modification prove to be unsuccessful with this type of personality.