By: Ennis Baker, Sharon Little & Lauren Thomason
As we confront the challenges facing communities and families and look for creative and effective strategies to promote resilience in young children, the vulnerabilities and opportunities presented by the first 1,000 days of life demand our attention. The science that informs best practice in early intervention, early childhood education, and early childhood mental health is clear: the most important resource infants and toddlers have is the relationships they develop with adult caregivers. For young children in child care programs, relationships with their teachers are a resource they depend on.
Infants and toddlers enrolled in group child care spend up to 50 hours a week in classroom settings and rely on their teachers to provide safe, stable, nurturing, and responsive relationships; yet our child care systems do not prioritize relationship-based practices. From birth to age three, children are growing and forming neural connections faster than at any other point in their lives, with more than one million new neural connections forming every second.