DCRC Blog

A young child’s learning environment includes outside spaces, indoor places, and everything in between – toys, learning materials, wall displays, and equipment. It also includes the children and adults who interact in these spaces. A well-planned environment reflects the culture, home language, and interests of all children and their families. The learning environment has an important impact on children’s efforts to build relationships, play and learn, eat, and rest.

What does a resilience-promoting environment look like? How can one transform an environment into one that supports the social and emotional development of young children? Here are some ideas…

FLIP IT is a strategy that offers a simple, kind, strength-based, commonsense and effective four-step process to address children’s day-to-day behaviors that adults find challenging. The four steps are embodied in the FLIP mnemonic which stands for F – Feelings, L – Limits, I – Inquiries and P – Prompts. FLIP IT is nothing new, but transforms best practice into a strategy that is easy to remember, applicable in a variety of challenging situations and portable. It helps adults in supporting the social and emotional development of young children and in reducing instances of challenging behavior.

This blog post won’t be getting too much into this strategy though, because there are key prerequisites that are extremely helpful to have in place before even trying the FLIP IT strategy – or any strategy for that matter – for the first time.

We must continue to find solutions that protect and strengthen children and families. Universal social and emotional screening in early care and education settings is one such solution. This process of systematically and reliably identifying those children who need attention offers a tremendous opportunity to intervene early and before the problems escalate further. And, based on a recently released review of 18 such screening tools, the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) received the highest scores of technical adequacy and usability within early childhood settings.

Feelings are at the root of all behavior. When children have good feelings at their roots, positive behavior will grow like a healthy tree full of leaves. When behavior is negative, we must check the roots.

Children do not always understand the negative feelings they experience or why they internalize or externalize those feelings. Unhealthy or destructive behavior from children often gets big reactions from adults, who just want the behavior to stop. If we address the behavior without addressing the root feelings, the tree will grow unhealthy leaves (negative behavior).

All that being said, it’s not easy to pinpoint what might be the root cause of a challenging behavior. And when you do get to the root, what’s next? What does the child need from us in order to learn and cope in healthy ways?

Here are some common behaviors (leaves), possible reasons behind them (roots), and what children might need from us adults to help them along the way.

Resilient people tend to have something in their lives that helps them overcome challenges and move on in positive ways. The strengths that help resilient people bounce back are protective factors. Protective factors can be strengthened throughout life, and there are four key protective factors which all adults should continually nurture: relationships, internal beliefs, initiative, and self-control. Our team wants to help you do that!

We invite you to participate in a five-week Resiliency Challenge, where we will focus on those four key protective factors, and help you promote your own resilience – which we like to call “building your bounce.”

When teachers and families build strong relationships/partnerships based on respect and trust, they can work together to provide continuity for children and promote resilience. This is why the importance of teachers/caregivers building relationships with children and their families cannot be overlooked. With that said, it can be challenging for those relationships to form. Busy programs, busy families…we all know the drill. So we want to give you seven ideas for building relationships with children and families we feel are simple and that we hope you’ll try.

We can imagine that social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a big focus in your work because children seem to be needing even more support to engage in healthy social dynamics and cope with emotions in constructive ways. Adding more SEL to your already expansive to-do list probably feels like one thing too many. We are here to thank you for what you are already doing and to offer a little hope in knowing that SEL does not have to be “one more thing.” SEL can be about making the most of everyday, ordinary moments with children. It doesn’t have to be about adding to your list, but rather, finding the social and emotional learning in what you’re already doing.

Establishing connections with young children is so important, and we’d say especially important when they are babies, toddlers, or preschoolers! Here are some points to consider as you work on that relationship building.

Children throughout the country are facing mounting mental health issues, and parents and educators need to tend to children’s social and emotional well-being, primarily by being fully present and knowing how to engage in challenging, age-appropriate discussions, even with toddlers. Young children need guidance to make sense of the world even with topics that are difficult for parents.

I deliver a keynote message which carries this same title. During my keynote address, I try to use humor and practical experiences to help the audience understand the importance of doing what you can with the time you have. Life is ever changing, and sometimes things seem grim. I encourage you to control what you can. You may wish to start by taking a few of the following suggestions to live today well…