The Child Care Business Owner Institute

In a family center program, the concern of the provider or center is on the child and family. Moreover,  the program  will have innovative methods to increase interactions with families in the following ways: classroom telephones, personal family visits, journaling, parent-child events, etc. Furthermore, in a family centered childcare program, the community recognizes the facility as a family focal program.

Four Steps to Creating a family centered program?

Step One– Creating a family centered program is by viewing the parent and caregiver as the primary teacher of the child, because the parent is the first and most important teacher in a child’s life.

Step Two–  Home providers and center staff members  do whatever they can to support the parents in their role. For example: A parent has questions about potty training; The teacher, visits the professional development library to obtain an article for the parent to read and invites the parent to see him or her if there are anymore questions about potty training.

Step Three– There is good parent staff-communication in place. This could be any or all of the following: daily text messages, weekly emails, telephone calls, meetings, memos, use of social media, daily reports, newsletter, bulletin boards and so much more.

Step four– Provide services that assist parents in their role including: parenting classes, a parent resource library, access to parenting magazines/articles, parenting blog,etc.

What are your plans to create a family centered program? If you already have a family centered program, please share how having a family centered program has impacted your relationship with parents?

It is very common to have differences with parents. In fact, differences with parents may occur when there is a lack of understanding, misunderstandings, lack of knowledge, culture differences or simply a difference in belief systems.

I remember when my daughter was in preschool and I was a full-time Registered Medical Assistant. I asked my childcare provider to wake-up my daughter at 2pm, because I thought nap-time was too long.

My provider explained to me that children needed to take a  nap everyday. I thought she wanted the kids to sleep 2-to 3 hours  because she needed a break.

It was a lack of knowledge on my part about how childcare was structured and my provider was willing to help me to understand why young children really needed. After all, she was the expert and I was very understanding of why kids needed to take a nap after she educated me on the importance of nap time.

In the event that you have a situation with a parent and you want to take an approach that will not offend the parent, try these 5 negotiation steps:

Step1… Reflect on what happened (“I see how upset you are about the situation”)

Step2…Explain (“Here’s what I think”)

Step3…Reason (I will give you a reason for what I think)

Step4…Understanding (Try to see the conflict from both point of views)

Step5…Negotiate (Begin to look for a solution when both parties are clear about the issues and our differing perspectives (What can we do about this situation?)

I hope that you have been compelled to handle differences with parents in a manner that ends in a mutually working relationship. Feel free to share a recent situation with a parent that involved negotiating differences.