Afifi - ECEs support children and families

The Center for Disease Control in the United States has indicated that in order to keep children safe from violence and to promote resilience and to foster health, they need to grow up in safe, stable environments with nurturing relationships. So, your environment that a child grows up in isn’t just the home. It’s any environment that they’re living and spending time in, that they’re growing and learning and developing in. 

And so this includes any environment that they are in, in terms of their early development. So again, if their home environment is unstable, if the early childhood educator and the early childhood education environment can be safe and stable and provide a nurturing relationship, that connects with protective factors. So that kind of helps the child be anchored to something that’s safe and stable, even if they’re not experiencing that at home. 

So that’s really important. And then again, an early childhood educator may be able to recognize when the family or the parents are struggling and then help to increase the stability within the home.  

Early childhood educators play a very important role in early intervention and identifying very early on families and children who might be at risk for poor outcomes. 

So, it’s understanding, it’s recognizing, it’s getting to know families. It’s using knowledge of child development. It’s using the relationship that they have with the child.  

So, I think that’s a really important role for early childhood educators to play, is to understand when families need help and to approach it not in a negative way, but in a very positive and supportive way. 

So again, I think early intervention is the most important. So, if we can identify children and families who are at risk very early on and figure out what supports they need in place to help the family and the child. So, it’s not just the child in isolation, but the child and the parents and the whole family. How can we support the whole family?  

And again, if this is addressed early on in the very beginning of life and not when the child is six or 16, then that’s when you’re going to see the most improvements for children.