Compassionate roots begin with babies
"Predictability helps build trust and gives the baby a sense of security.
Caregivers at the Pikler Institute slow down and wait for some kind of sign that the child has heard and understands what will happen next before they proceed.
The optimal time for relationship-building is during caregiving activities: those essential activities of daily living that meet infants’ physical needs.
Caregiving becomes the curriculum when done with careful, focused attention in partnership with the child.
Magda Gerber [Infant Secialist] always met aggression in infants and toddlers with gentleness.
Rewarding the victim of aggression with a great deal of attention can result in the child seeking further opportunities to become a victim.
The toddler who causes pain needs reassurance that the adult will be there to stop her next time if she can’t stop herself."
"Caregiving becomes the curriculum when done in the way that Gerber and Pikler taught. Not only does the caregiver meet physical needs, but she takes into consideration emotional, social, and cognitive needs as well. It’s a way of empowering infants and helping them feel significant. All this happens with tenderness and gentleness — compassion!" ~ Janet Gonzalez-Mena
What an amazing way to view the day to day care of a young person!
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Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President of the Children Defense Fund, is an advocate of children and the importance of early education and quality childcare. She refers to the thousands of disadvantaged children swept into the criminal justice system as getting caught up in the
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
"We're spending three times more per prisoner than per public school pupil in all of our states. That's the dumbest set of investment priorities I can think of, and we're standing for it."
~ Marian Wright Edelman
In an interview with UpFront magazine's Editor-in-Chief Glenn Cook and Senior Editor Lawrence Hardy, Ms. Edelman discussed what schools can do to break the pipeline:
"The most important thing is to have students be able to read and compute and stay at grade level. When we looked at teen pregnancy a number of years ago, the two largest predictors of who was going to become a teen mother - and I would also say, a juvenile delinquent- were basic skills level and poverty. If you held those two variables constant, you had identical rates between white, black and Latino children."
I liked the quote by Janet Gonzalez and I agree with her quote. I blieve it is very important to make a child feel secure and safe.As educators we not only teach them academics, we also teach them life skills and how to become successful.
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