Choosing a childcare course

Do you want to improve your CV and get ahead in your career? Courses can be a fantastic way to do this or simply to explore new subjects but there’s a bewildering array out there. Here’s how to narrow it down.

What do you want the course to do?

If you’re hoping that it will lead to a new career you need to make sure that the course is recognised by potential employers. If you just want a bit more information then accreditation and recognition is less important but you still want to be confident that the course content is accurate. Deals through sites like Wowcher and Groupon may look great but they don’t lead to recognised qualifications and you may end up paying money, and putting time in, for nothing.

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Child development: BF Skinner

Burrhus Skinner (1904-1990) was a behavioural theorist whose work was mostly based on experiments carried out on rodents. He believed that animals and people were essentially the same, but that people were simply capable of more sophisticated learning. His argument was that all behaviour is linked to nurture and that behaviour is intrinsically linked to punishment and reward. By punishing negative behaviour and rewarding desirable behaviour an animal or person will learn to behave in the expected way. Skinner, however, prioritised reward over punishment, and advocated breaking things down into achievable steps with plenty of positive reinforcement and reward for each step. His work also influenced education by encouraging the repetition of the same type of sum or word.

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Second interviews, trials and settling in sessions – to pay or not to pay

First interviews are very rarely paid in the nanny industry. The exception would be paying expenses or a weekend long interview, which doubles up as a trial.

Some parents will offer to pay for the time taken for a second interview. Whether you do or not is your choice, but if you didn’t give your children the chance to meet your nanny at a first interview then she’s probably expecting to come back for a second interview, and many nannies won’t accept a job where they’ve not met the children first. Shortlisting candidates is fairly standard, especially in a competitive market, and second interviews are sufficiently common that they count as part of the normal recruitment process. A second interview should remain fairly short, although you might ask your nanny to play with your children or join in the evening routine.

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Child development: Gesell

Arnold Gesell (1880-1961) studied children to observe and record their growth and development. He divided normative development into 10 areas, named gradients of growth. He was a maturationist, so ignored outside influences although he understood the conflict between nature and nurture, and identified the developmental milestones which are widely used today.

He categorised development into 10 areas.

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Child development: Bowlby

John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a psychoanalyst best known for his work on attachment. He thought that many mental health and behavioural problems stemmed from the first years of life, and that babies are born with an inbuilt need to form an attachment to one figure – usually the mother. This primary bond was the most important attachment and formed the pattern for all other relationships in a person’s life. Children should be cared for by this person up until the age of 2, ideally the age of 5, and any disruption avoided. Short term separation, he thought, led to distress which was separated into 3 stages.

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Child development: Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) was a psychoanalyst who was particularly interested in the way that a child’s personality develops. He divided development into 8 ‘ages’ or stages that children need to progress through to become self-fulfilled adults. Like many other theorists Erikson defined each stage by a conflict that need to be resolved. Erikson’s theory focuses on conflict between a positive and a negative emotion and lasted from birth right through to the end of life. His theory also put society and a person’s relationships with others at the centre of their development.

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How to poach-proof your nanny relationship

A good nanny is a prize, one that other families may stoop low enough to try to steal from you. Nanny poaching can happen anywhere from the school gate to your own garden gate and it can be anyone including your next door neighbour or anyone close friend.

Some will say that a nanny who allows herself to be poached wasn’t happy in her job anyway. After all when you’re in a content and committed relationship you’re not casting around for a better partner! If you do sweep the room occasionally it’s just eye candy, and while your nanny might periodically flick through job ads it isn’t necessarily a sign of discontent. Poaching is more dangerous. Poaching is the equivalent of someone coming up to you in a bar, buying you a drink or six while whispering sweet nothings in your ear and ultimately enticing you to come home with them.

You can’t stop someone coming up to your nanny and buying them that drink, but you can make sure their sweet nothings fall on deaf ears and here’s how…

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Child development: Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1902) focused on a child’s cognitive development and was the first psychologist to study cognitive development closely. He used the term Schema to explain how a child learns to understand the world around them. What a child does influences how they think about the world, and the new information they gain from redoing the activity changes how they think, modifying or extending the schema. Development is a process of reorganising these schemas and allowing a child to progress to the next stage of development.

When a child is in a state of equilibrium their schemata can explain the world around them. Children have to have assimilate, or gather, information about the world to explain what is happening around them according to their existing schemata. As they experience new things they cannot explain using their existing schemata Piaget felt they were in disequilibrium and needed to modify their schemata to create equilibrium, a leap in development. The process of modifying schemata and finding equilibrium is called accommodation.

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Child development: Freud

One of the first child development theorists was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that all children had innate, basic aggressive and sexual desires, and the way that parents and other adults dealt with these desires would determine a child’s personality when they were grown up.

According to Freud babies are born with a selfish ‘ID’ which only cares about gratification of selfish urges. Later a child develops an ‘EGO’ as they learn that not all of their wants and desires can be fulfilled. The Ego is more realistic than the Id but still self-centred. Last to develop is the ‘SUPER-EGO’ which works with the Ego to control the Id and represents moral values. The Super-Ego is capable of acting altruistically and suppressing the desires of the Id and Ego which are self-serving.

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Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

Ever wondered what NNEB training was like 50 years ago? A far cry from now, Pam Weaver’s memoirs talk about her first job as a nursery assistant in a children’s home, her training and post-qualifying experience as a nursery nurse there and then her time as a private nanny, stints as a maternity nurse and her training on a neonatal unit.

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