'I'm an early childhood educator: Here's everything we won't tell you.'

We put all of our trust in our early childhood services, they have our precious children but the service from exit point is pretty much a mystery. We need them (desperately!) yet we seem to know very little about what goes on behind the scenes, what actually happens when we toddle off to work and wave ‘goodbye’ to our children and ‘good luck’ to the staff.

As an early childhood educator, here are the answers to some of your most common questions:

Do we have favourites?

No, we do not, but we do ‘connect’ easier with some children over others, based mostly on individual personalities and temperaments just as we all do with various people in our lives. This is not something that should be at all obvious; in fact, we are required to work inclusively with each and every child, based on their interests and development, nurturing, routine and care needs.

The truth is that we adore all the idiosyncrasies of the different personalities and individual uniqueness they each hold.

The educators grow attached to ‘their children’ and miss them when they leave their room or head off to school; they often talk and think about them years later with fondness.

What should you call us?

First of all, NOT babysitters, and mostly likely not ‘carers’ or even ‘childcare workers’, these all have connotations of being ‘ho hum’ and just making sure that the children make it through the day with all their limbs still attached and without peas up their noses. Of course, this is important, but there is so much more involved in the role. Call us ‘Educators’, because that’s what we are.

Early childhood ‘Educators’ use their knowledge of early childhood theories and pedagogies to intentionally mould those young minds, bodies and souls, remembering that, the most important time in a child's life for learning is between 0-5 yrs. Educators are all trained, and in some cases highly trained, to develop these young monkeys to reach their full potential in their learning and development in these early years.

Many passionate Educators spend their weekends and nights at Kmart, op shops and gluing ‘stuff’ together.

Many educators spend their own money creating environments and learning experiences for the children in their rooms.

These passionate educators spend their weekends buying up big in Kmart, Vinnies and Daiso, finding the best tents, natural materials, baskets or old fashioned crockery for their home corner, and they spend hours sifting through the bargain bins in Spotlight buying fabrics to make ‘A bear hunt’ cave.

They have spent many late nights laminating name tags and place mats, redecorating their rooms, finding horded ‘reusable’ items around their house, gluing icy pole stick picture frames together and completing the horrendous amount of documentation required of an Educator today.

How do we ‘handle’ that many children all at once?

The truth is consistency, routine, peer pressure and trial and error. A positive and consistent routine is paramount, so that the children know what to expect each day. The children don’t tend to mind if they need to wash their hands (again), because they expect it to occur as a routine at certain times of the day in a predictable and logical sequence, and besides, everyone- is- doing- it.

You know how they eat all the vegetables at the service and while at home they would rather jab it in their eye than eat it? That’s because other children are making that carrot look might-ty cool, the educators sell that food like vacuum cleaner salespeople, and it’s become like the Belgian chocolate of the vegetable world.

Educators are trained to understand how children think and why they act the way they do, but strategies don’t always work, and a lot of trial and error, professional conversations and reflection come with discovering new and better ways of guiding children.

Month 6: Childcare, maternal instincts, and gender reveal parties. Post continues...

The service has been ‘rated’ according to how good it is or ‘High quality’.

It’s hard to choose a service for your children, sometimes none seem to fit and other times there are just so many that you end up confused and craving the smell of clag and playdoh.

Did you know that even before you’ve enrolled, you can find out how good the service is? There is a sneaky little site, OK, it’s not sneaky, and it’s there for families to make informed decisions about the service they choose for their child. If you look up ‘The Australian Children’s Education and Care Authority (ACECQA)’ website and navigate to the ‘National registers’ bar, you can search any centre you want, to find out their results when they were observed, assessed and rated by ACECQA. The service will also have this available for viewing in their foyer area.