Secure Relationships: Nurturing Infant/Toddler Attachment in Early Care Settings

by Alice Sterling Honig

For healthy adjustment in childhood and later in life, infants and toddlers need secure attachments to the adults who care for them.  Loving, responsive, and consistent care from primary caregivers is key to young children learning to form relationships. Alice Honig, with her vast experience and deep knowledge of research and theory, distills key points needed in understanding and building attachment. Vital information and sound advice for caregivers and parents too.

Genres: Parenting

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

Reviews

[Tony Laplume · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve now passed five years as an early childhood caregiver, and while much of my perspective on its responsibilities was formed while helping care for my niece beforehand, everything I’ve learned over this span has made it clear how crucial intentional relationships with the children in my care are to its success. Reading a book like Secure Relationships, a fairly quick survey from NAEYC, is the kind of positive reinforcement that I sometimes need when I look at how coworkers and as a result a whole program actually tend to function, and no one seems to notice or care, making it that much more worth continually fighting for the ideals not only of the program but my approach and how I’ve seen such fruitful results spring from it.

We live in an incredibly strange age. One might actually argue, as with a lot of aspects to the wider culture around it, there is no point in history where more attention has been given to the early development of human life, and yet with a glut of information and insight, casual dismissal of these resources seems to be the norm. We live in a culture of convenience where excuses and rationalizations are constantly made. At work I’m constantly confronted with the idea that known guidelines are less important than the daily coping mechanisms that ignore long-term consequences. At no point is the growth of a child the primary goal, but rather getting through another workday, workweek, an entire career, going through the motions, the needs of the adult apparently more important than those of the children in their care, compromises so widespread that they’re regularly embraced as rational decisions.

Why does a baby cry? From the common view, there’s really only one viable response, and that is to find the simplest way to make it stop. And yet to deny the complexity of the problem is to deny the reality that even babies are infinitely complex individuals whose needs must be addressed at individual levels, that how you respond to crying is the very beginning of their journey to obviously complex lives, their budding abilities as they blossom in the first year and all the way forward. And this is an argument that you form bonds, relationships, in other words genuine affection for these children. For some they won’t need much. For others, for any number of reasons, they will, and it’s the fundamental role of a caregiver to provide it, as the very foundation of their work.

So that’s generally what you’ll find in this book. The caregiver who can read this and come away with nothing that impacts or affects their performance has no business holding such responsibility.

[Amber]

1 copy