The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Infant & Toddler Families

Families already have all the “right” tools to support their babies: they just need to know how to use them.

In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing with you the ultimate guide to supporting infant and toddler families through parent education. Because here’s the thing: The single most important thing your families need to realize about supporting their young child’s development is that they already have all the “right” tools to support their babies: they just need to know how to use them.

All around the world, educators and therapists working with families with infants and toddlers are moving to a “routines-based intervention” approach.

Essentially what that means is that the research is finally catching up with what professionals in early childhood education have known for a long time: tiny humans must be supported by responsive caregivers, and do this best in their natural environment.

In the first few years of life, children learn through a process of observation (observing others), imitation (starting to imitate others) and interaction (interacting with objects in the environment and with other people in the environment).

And everyday routines are those common threads that help children make sense of the world, and help them learn about basic concepts, about vocabulary for things around them, about how their bodies move and how the world feels, and about how to engage socially with others.

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So when parents and caregivers can learn to maximize the everyday routines and everyday objects that they’re often already participating in and using, they can unlock their potential and boost development… and this, in turn, gives them the peace of mind they crave: it empowers them to do the big job of parenting tiny humans. They get to combat the overwhelm of early parenthood.

Parenting is that great equalizer, and no matter where your families come from, what language(s) they speak, what socio-economic bracket under which they fall, or whether a child is developing along a typical progression or whether she falls outside the norm, there’s one single thing we all need to realize:

When you can help families learn to recognize the tools they already have to boost their young child’s development, you’re able to help them maximize the time they have with their babies, you help them feel empowered to “get it right,” and you’re able to help them unlock the power of everyday routines (diaper) and everyday objects (paper roll) to figure out how to support their tiny human and boost all areas of development.

Play, Talk, Sing, Move

So what are the kinds of things we as educators and therapists can do to support young children and their families? What are the things we can show parents and caregivers that can help them infuse every single interaction with more connection, more opportunities for interaction, more vocabulary, more modeling?

I see these as play, talk, sing, and move. I refer to these as the 4-pillars of Learn With Less®. I come back to these in each one of my therapeutic sessions as a pediatric speech-language pathologist, in everything I model and discuss with client families, and in all my parent education work with Learn With Less®.

Now, the ultimate goal both with direct therapy and with any kind of parent education or enrichment class, is to build family capacity, competence, and confidence.