Everyone Needs Attention: Helping Young Children Thrive by Tamar Jacobson

Author:Tamar Jacobson [Jacobson, Tamar]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-09-15T09:20:00+00:00

More often than not, though, acquiring this awareness is hard work day to day, moment to moment. It takes a certain kind of training of our minds. We develop skills to look out for signs. For example, we may find it hardest to become aware when situations or relationships are challenging and we become lost in the passions of an emotionally charged moment. But we can always sit back quietly and reflect after the fact. We can analyze and make connections between that specific child, situation, or interaction and our feelings. Asking ourselves how we feel, how those feelings relate to the reality of the moment, and how the incident pushed some emotional buttons that trace back to things that happened to us when we were very young is one of the skills we can learn to help ourselves become aware of what we do in emotional situations. We can write our thoughts down to read later when we are calmer. Or we can just sit and think about it, holding still and allowing ourselves to really feel the emotions that rise up for us in those emotionally charged situations with young children in our care.

Out of all the education literature that I reviewed as I was writing this book, including books and articles about discipline, few talked about how teachers’ emotional development affects or influences interactions with children. I became excited when I found a couple of sentences acknowledging that the teacher could set an emotional tone in the classroom, even though it went no deeper than that: “Every morning, Ms. Mitchell thinks about how her feelings will affect her teaching. If she feels frustrated or overwhelmed when she arrives at school, she takes a deep breath and makes a plan for managing her emotions so that she can fully engage with her students and coteachers” (Tominey et al. 2017, 6).

In Enid Elliot’s important book We’re Not Robots: The Voices of Daycare Providers (2007), she explains that not all early childhood educators are prepared for the “complicated work of caregiving.” She worked with the staff of her school-based program to help them reflect about what attachment meant to them personally by have them write notes informally to each other in a journal, which staff could take home or write in during their lunch breaks. One of the staff, “Jade,” wrote in the journal:

I’m finding reading and talking about others’ views on attachment and detachment extremely helpful. I realize it is not as simple as the isolated incidents of caregiving in this center. We all come with our own attachment behaviors of our past! You feel so deeply and then begin to question just what is healthy or not in these feelings. Letting the child take the lead seems to me to be the key for judging healthy relationships. This calls for a constant awareness from us, the adults in the situation. Not always easy, but then growth and awareness aren’t always an easy path. . . . I feel that the thin line between healthy and unhealthy is becoming clearer as we all work to define it.

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