Area Of Child Care Research Articles

Quality training for infant caregivers

Training for caregivers of infants and toddlers is a national need, since this is the fastest growing area of child care sought. Trainees will need to know in detail about Eriksonian and Piagetian theory, in order to be sensitive to the tasks and the gains of each stage of the first years of life. Research findings that are important for caregivers relate to the importance of bodyloving, sensitivity to infant signals, and prompt responsiveness to infant needs for ensuring later emotional mental health, problem-solving competency, and ego-resiliency in the preschool years. Personal and contexual ways that trainers can foster competence in caregivers are explained. These include modeling positive interactions with infants and parents, exploring beliefs, values, and feelings, and praising trainees as they try new ways to embed curricular goals into daily routines with babies.

Work with parents of abused and neglected children

THIS COMMUNICATION is based on the experience with 19 families whose abused or neglected children were hospitalized at the Children’s Department, Ullevaal Hospital, over a period of one year. The work with the families was limited to the duration of the child’s stay in the hospital, and did not differ in any qu~i~tive way from other parental or family coun~ling in the area of child care, preventive health services, child guidance or adult psychiatric social work. The aims were: 1) to establish a relationship with the parents; 2) to conduct a psychosocial inquiry; 3) to attain a psychosocial diagnosis of the family; 4) to decide on a plan of treatment; and 5) to motivate parents for cooperating in treatment. Before any constructive work with the family could take place, we found they had to experience a relationship characterized by sufficient trust to enable them to participate adequately in a psychosocial inquiry into the current family situation. Thereafter, through cooperation of the inte~~fession~ team, evaluation led to formulation of a family diagnosis and adoption of a treatment plan. Such a plan included a wide spectrum of measures from long-term support to such extreme and authoritative interventions as taking the child into care. An important aim also was to motivate parents to further cooperation with community resources such as kindergarten, municipal health and social centres, child guidance clinics, foster homes or children’s homes. This discussion is limited to the development of the relationship with the parents, the psychosocial inquiry, and motivation of the parents. In conclusion, the important question of the relationship and personal reactions of the team to the parents they encountered is examined.

Methods used by general practitioners in developmental screening of preschool children.

A study of the methods used by 20 general practitioners to perform developmental screening examinations of preschool children showed that routine physical examination was adequately performed but at the expense of additional tests of child development. A total of 348 children were examined by either a doctor (144 cases) or a health visitor (90), or both (114). The degree of participation by health visitors suggests that developmental screening need not necessarily be the sole responsibility of doctors, and health visitors should have training opportunities as they have an important contribution to make in this area of child care. Some omissions in testing hearing, vision, and language were clearly due to conflicting demands on the general practitioners' time, but some tests were not performed because the doctors doubted their value. Nevertheless, too many children still enter school with hearing, visual, and speech handicaps that could have been easily identified. If preventive medicine is to become an increasing component of general practice, the methods used by doctors and health visitors must be scrutinised before attempting to evaluate the outcome of large-scale screening programmes.

The Vocal Behavior of Infants as Related to the Nursing Procedure of Rocking

COLLEEN SMITHERMAN (B.S., Indiana University, Bloomington; M.Ed., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) is an instructor at the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota. She is interested in the use of quantitative techniques in the evaluation of nursing care, especially in the area of child care.