Parenting Guidance: How Daycare Teachers Can Help
Posted on: 12 July 2019
New parents often feel lost when they first become parents. They enroll their children in daycare, and sometimes they turn to the daycare teachers for support and guidance. That is where you, a childcare teacher, can be of great help. Here is how.
Answering Parent Questions about the Latest Parenting Guides
Back when Dr. Spock was "the word" on child-rearing, no one asked child development specialists or daycare teachers anything. Now it seems like there is a new child parenting approach out every year. As a childcare teacher, parents would naturally expect you to know something about this, and they would want you to answer their questions in regards to what these parenting books have to say.
Since most childcare teachers attempt to keep up-to-date on new parenting information and resources, you can purchase these books or borrow them from libraries to peruse just in case a parent has questions. Essentially the parents will be looking to you to either confirm or deny what the books are saying or provide your own professional and educated opinion about parenting.
Alleviating Parental Concerns
Parents naturally become concerned with their children's development. They always want to know if their children are developing "normally," or if they should have their children tested for developmental disorders. As a trained professional, you already know if a child should be tested for autism, or another child is physically behind in gross motor development and should be checked out by a pediatrician.
However, it is generally not your place to bring these issues up unless a parent brings them up first. If a parent asks, you can launch into a respectful conversation in regards to your professional opinion as to what you think might be best for the child in question. It is then up to the parents to decide what the next step will be.
Providing Resources
All daycare teachers with a one-year certificate or a two-year Associate's degree tend to have a large bucket of community and government resources to share with parents. These resource files are an extremely useful and invaluable tool to both parents and teachers. As a daycare teacher, you might have more than one resource bucket, especially if you have been collecting these resources and contact information and updating everything over five or more years as a teacher.
When parents ask for help, you can be the one to provide resources such as Babywise that might help them feel more confident in their parenting abilities.
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