Ninth Week: October 19

Exchange Every day
Bonnie’s New Blog Oct. 20, 2009
. . .and then the day came when the risk to remain tight inside a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
As I read Bonnie’s blog the thoughts kept running through my mind, “how could any mother give up her child? How could a family opt to get an incentive over raising their own child? In the master Cohort this summer we saw a video, the title I cannot remember. It asked the question is mothering inherit or learnt? Using mice, not humans, they found that a large portion of mothering was not instinctual but learnt. Interesting, if a society chooses a practice, not beneficial to the family unit or the children of their nation, everyone follows it because everyone’s doing it. This, to me, is a scary thought. Now, we don’t live in Romania and we don’t have warehouse orphanages, but are there practices, we do in Hawaii or our nation, that don’t benefit the family unit and our children? Exacting information from the mouse study it would seem so important that communities were taught-informed-mentored-modeled practices that are good-beneficial-healthful to the family unit and children.
Early childhood center of care are often a families first experience with people who are trained in “good practices” for child.
To the question of moral dilemma, what is right? My job is so important, teacher, director, administrator your job is crucial. It is right! Even if we are not called “professionals” even if we are under paid for “this season”, we must understand, with out a doubt, that to some degree our nation, and course there of, rest on us.
Maybe you have a different opinion, what do you think?


Additional Reading:
Supporting Grandparents who raise Grandchildren by Birckmayer et al.

Our school is seeing a continual rise in grandparents raising children. We have one where parents are incarcerated, a few on drugs, and one the mother just left. My heart goes out to these grand parents literally forced into a situation of parenting again. When these grandparents come into the school we try to carter to them, offering a chair or a cup of coffee. I like these points the article made
Early Childhood educators can:
*Listen empathically to grandparents
*Encourage grandparents to avail themselves of community resources
*Provide information about where to obtain good legal services
*Gather information about community organizations or resources for children with special needs.

I would add trying to network them with people. An example would be a stay at home mom who could give the grandparents a break on the weekend to go out.
This trend seems to be a social problem, the culprit of which is drugs, alcohol use, divorce, mental and physical illness, child abuse and neglect, incarceration, even death.

As you get older you tend to look forward to years of empty nest. My eldest daughter tells me I’m not at all as hard (concerning discipline) on the youngest child as I was on her. Truth be told, she right…I’m mellowing with age and so is my husband. But this is a natural process. My heart goes out to grandparent who would prefer to be “grandparent” being forced to be parents again.


Chapter 12 “Working with Families and Communities” Planning and Administering Early Childhood Programs Ninth Edition by Decker, Decker, Freeman and Knopf

Opportunities for program, families, and communities to work together are a crucial component of quality early childhood programming (Larner, 1996; Raab & Dunst, 1997).
It’s very important that families and communities understand the important role they play in their young children. It very important that educator make parents feel welcome and important. I have seen teachers, in my 20 years of teaching that would be condescending to parents. The fact is it’s not always easy to raise your children but for the most part parents know their children a lot better than a teacher ever will. If the teacher is smart she will utilize the knowledge of the parent. To me, parent & teacher collaboration is the best method to educate a child. I always tell our parents we are partners.

Families with higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be involved in their children’s schools and their children are likely to perform better academically than are children from low-income families (Lee & Burkam, 2002; Smith, Brooks-Gun, & Klebanov, 1997; Stevenson & Baker, 1987). Eleanore Fong-Severance Child Nutrition Specialist researched the location of our site and told me we are in a poverty level area. She determined this by using charts/maps to determine USDA funding for child’s lunches. I don’t think it was any “bell ringing” news to me. I work with this community everyday. I love my community and the people who live here. However, I would be untruthful not to say it comes with it’s own set of problems. Being connected with knowledgeable mentors has been my greatest resource. People who help me help people. Having strong relationships with our families helps us to understand things they value. Tension between families and center personnel can make collaboration difficult. Teachers that continually have tensions between families need to look into the mirror. Are they smiling, are they sincere, are they listening, are they avoiding being a “know it all”? Parents who truly feel the teacher cares for their children (good, bad and the ugly) will, in my opinion, receive instruction from them. A teacher or director can have a lot of knowledge but without people skills the have no way to share it. Building strong relationship during the good times helps a teacher immensely during the bad times.

See Baby Discriminate: Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What’s a parent to do?
Hawaii is full of different colors and cultures. I realize that we want to be color blind, but we are different color. Shouldn’t we be looking at character instead of color? I don’t have very much to say about this article. According to the article, “At the Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept on thousands of families in the Austin area”. All the data was collected from one location, Austin Texas. How many thousand? Two, three? The picture on the cover evoked a feeling of sadness toward racism. Did anyone else get the same feeling? I’m not trying to be critical, I wish the research was taken from all over the country.