Babies and their Right to Agency - The Early Childhood Exchange

Understanding the Unique Role of Baby Educators Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Warandry Warang people of the cooler nation as a traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we live. We live on stolen land. Sovereignty was never ceded. Welcome to the Early Childhood Exchange, the podcast that explores the world of early childhood education. Join us as we engage in meaningful conversations on topics that matter, from developmental milestones and inclusive practise to the impact of play and family engagement. Each episode features insightful discussions with educators, experts, and advocates who are dedicated to creating a nurturing and enriching environment for children. Whether you're a parent, teacher, or simply curious about the future of education. TuneIn as we tackle these important conversations, one small voice at a time. Speaker 2 And the other thing that I really love about working with babies is the very close relationships that you have with parents. Because parents are leaving their babies with us, we have to do a lot of communicating with those parents. We've got to share information with each other. I think that the early childhood teacher working with babies has a really unique role to play in the education and the care for that child. So of course I'm going to try and get as much information from the parents as I can share as much information as I am learning about their child with the parent. Speaker 1 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 7 of the Early Childhood Exchange podcast. Today I'm joined by Sarah Jobson. She's the course chair of the Bachelor of Early Childhood Teaching here at Victoria University and she has a particular passion for the important work that we do as early childhood teachers in working with babies. Exploring How Babies Influence Their Own Lives So today's topic is babies and agency. Welcome, Sarah. Speaker 2 Thank you very much. I will say that I have spent quite a bit of time working in babies rooms. It's actually my favourite age group to work with. I love the fact that everything is brand new for babies. They are so smart. I actually think that they're smarter than us. They just don't have as much experience in the world. Their brains are working so hard so fast. They're putting theories together about how the world works. And the other thing that I really love about working with babies is the very close relationships that you have with parents. That's really, really important, especially because parents are leaving their babies with us. So we have to do a lot of communicating with those parents. We've got to share information with each other. I don't think that as an infant educator we are a substitute mother. I don't think we're taking the place of the mother or the father, the parents. This idea of the substitute mother is actually that's a theory or concept from Peter Moss, but we won't talk about that right now. I think that the early childhood teacher working with babies has a really unique role to play in the education and the care for that child. So of course, I'm going to try and get as much information from the parents as I can and share as much information as I am learning about their child with the parent. Yeah. So I think that's. Speaker 1 Really, Yeah. Like you said, it's a lot for a lot of parents, it's the very first time that they've left their baby and you are trusted with that. So it's a big, it's a big relationship it. Speaker 2 Is, and it's such an important and significant time for parents. They've never, some of them have never done this before. They don't know what they're doing. They're learning. Is, is they go and the more experience that we as teachers get in the baby's room, we we come to, we almost have more experience with children under 2 than the parents, but we don't have more experience of is their particular child. So we've got a really unique role, an important role. I think that the work that educators do in the baby's room is the most important work. Like children under 2, this is when their brain architecture is formed like there is synapses and there's connections happening. Just they're just their brains are just firing all the time. So we need to be listening to babies, responding to babies, bringing them all the excitement in the world to help their little brains form that they're learning that when I when I am communicating some kind of message, someone responds, they're learning that trust that I ask for something somebody helps me. So I it's the most important work that happens. You sound so much education I. Speaker 1 Can hear the passion in your voice. Oh well, our topic that we're exploring today is agency, and we'll unpack that. But the first question that I have for you is, can you start by explaining what agency means in the context of babies? Speaker 2 Sure. It's a word that we use a lot in early childhood education. There are whole pH DS written on this subject. Caroline Scott, for example. I like to bring it down to just children have influence over their lives that when there are decisions being made that babies have an opinion about that, that they have the capabilities to say this is what I want and to influence decisions that are being made. So for me, when I'm working with babies, when I'm thinking about their agency, it's the baby who is standing at the window banging on the window in the rain. The child's trying to say I want to go outside and play in the rain. Now, as an adult, I do have more life experience. I know that if the child goes outside, that they're going to get wet clothes and that might be uncomfortable. That if the child's telling me they want to go outside to play in the rain, that I can provide the waterproof clothing, that I can provide the spare clothes for after they get wet. I know that it's just about lunchtime or, or that it's a thunderstorm and there's lightning and we can't go outside. I've got to put all that together. But the baby still has that influence if we are willing to listen. Because the younger the child, the more vulnerable they are, the more we can exploit our power over them. Because when the child's not using words, I can just pretend that I don't know what they're saying or I can just ignore them and think that I know better. I can just scoop, I can physically pick them up and take them somewhere else without any problems. So that means that a pre verbal child, a non verbal child is really vulnerable to us exploiting our power and overriding the decisions that the baby's trying to make there. So if we're aware of that, sometimes we think we don't have power when we're really childhood teachers. We think, you know, the director's telling me this and the parents are telling me that. But we, we really do. If we can recognise that, then we can share that power. Yeah, with babies. Speaker 1 And would you in that example, would you then enter in a conversation with the child about, so let's say they're tapping out the window, there's lightning. What would you do next? We can't go outside. You know that the baby doesn't know. And how would you continue supporting that child's agency? Speaker 2 Well, we do have language, yeah, as adults, and the baby does understand some of the things that we're saying. So in that situation, I might come down with the child and I might share, have that joint attention. So they're noticing the rain. I might come next to them down to their level and share that attention with them to say, oh, you're looking at the rain. We can't go outside because there's lightning. Isn't the rain beautiful? Maybe sing some rain songs so acknowledge their interest in the rain, even if we can't take them outside of that particular time. But what we can't do is use that as an excuse to not listen to babies to always. It's just so easy when you're working in the baby's room to make decisions that benefit the adults and not the child. It will be easier for me if we don't go and play outside in the rain because I won't have to do the change of the clothes afterwards. Yes, So Oh, I know I'll just I'll just pay attention to what they're paying attention to. I'll narrate their actions. I'll have a story in the song instead. Are still Those are good things, but we can't use them as an excuse to make the easier decisions for the adults in the room. Speaker 1 Yeah. Unpacking Babies' Emotional Intelligence and Capabilities And you touched on something that's going to bring me to my next question around these assumptions that we make about young children. So that's zero to two because the developmental milestones, if we're looking at that, you know, they're non verbal. They are, you know, like I remember a TAFE teacher once described a baby as a BLOB that just blobs. Oh dear. Speaker 2 It's. Speaker 1 A little BLOB. I disagree. Yeah, yeah. So this, this whole idea that, you know, because some children do go into into early learning services from six months old, sometimes six weeks, but generally 6 months. And, you know, they're, they're just, they're hanging out. They're not, they're not generally doing very, very much as we would say it. So how do we apply agency to, let's say, a six month old baby? Speaker 2 This idea that babies are, I haven't quite heard it put in the terms of BLOB before, but I do often hear people who are new to the baby's room saying I don't know how to plan for babies because they don't do anything. I really hear that a lot. They don't do anything. And I think that's because as adults we're really tuned into people's words. Although if we're thinking about it, we also turned tuned into body language, but that's all we've got with babies. And sometimes the only communication that they're giving us is through their gaze. If I came into a brand new baby's room, I picked up a baby, took them to the change table and started changing their nappy. They don't have like they can't tell me to stop, that they're uncomfortable. They don't that even if they could, they don't really understand what is this feeling of uncomfortableness. They might just not look at me and that's their communication to us to say I'm not feeling comfortable with a total stranger changing my nappy right now. So we have to pay attention. We have to notice, we have to, well, in an early childhood, we call this an observation. It's the noticing. I notice that the baby has averted their gaze from me. They're not comfortable. So that's that's for a very, very young baby. And babies from six weeks are smiling. We can see when they're happy or when they're not by looking at their faces or by looking at how tense they are in their body or how relaxed they are in their body. Now there, there's been some various times in the media where people have said about the idea of asking children if they're ready to have their nappy changed. And the conversation in the media is about how ridiculous that is because the the child can't tell us that they need to have their nappy changed. The child can't make those decisions. We know best. It's a total misrepresentation of the conversation of yes, we say to the child, can I change your nappy now? But if we really have to change the nappy now we have that extra information that the baby doesn't. If you remain in this dirty nappy you will get a sore bottom O. It's not about always doing what the baby wants, but it's about respect, about listening to the child to say, can I change your nappy now or it's time for me to change your nappy now to give them that warning. Imagine if as an adult, if I just walked in and just took your laptop away from you in the middle of you typing. It's kind of similar when you just walk up to a baby, whip them up, take them off to the change table, change the table, the nappy like it's a factory production line and dump them back on the floor. So it's about that respect. It's like when we go to the doctors and the doctor says I'm going to do this now, is that OK? You know, can you roll up your sleeve because I'm going to give you an injection now. It's a little bit similar for our babies. Speaker 1 I think respect is such an important word here that you use because, you know, often we do think that we're doing things to a child. We're not doing it with them. We're not in a relationship with them in that way. It's not reciprocal because I'm a grown up. I can think through everything. And you're a child, and you need to listen to what I have to say. Do as you're told. Yeah. You know that sort. Speaker 2 Of thing, but children should be seen and not heard. Do as you're told. Speaker 1 But it's a society that set it up that way. Speaker 2 I love what you said then about we do things with the child and not to the child. If we put that on a big poster up in our rooms to remind us, then I think it would be easier for us to listen. Yeah. And not. Speaker 1 Today it is easier to to do your work if you're working together with the child, you know, you'd have a lot more moments of connection and that building that really, really deep relationship. Speaker 2 Yeah, can I, can I tell you a story? Speaker 1 Yes, please. Speaker 2 This is from my PhD research. I was in a beautiful centre with beautiful educators doing an amazing job, but we were just doing some reflecting about a child under 2. Their parents had split up. The child was being quite aggressive in the classroom, hurting other children. And the response from the educators was to get cross at that child, to tell that child off, to remove them from the situation, sort of give them a time out. And we just did some thinking about what what do both children need in a conflict? The child who's hurt the other and the child that's been hurt. How do we listen to both of those people? What are those both of those people communicating to us? And so with a little bit of reflection, a little bit of thinking about those behaviours, we thought, okay, what this child might actually need is a sense of certainty in their life. They might need some emotional relational connection. So they put a plan in place that when there was a conflict between two children, that one educator would look after one child and the other educator would look after the child who hurt the other, and they took the child to a chair. She liked reading books, so they took the child to the chair, read books to the child until she was feeling more connected. So that that was helping in the room to just with all the relationships between the children. But what we found after a little period of time was that when the child was getting frustrated, she would take herself off to the book corner and start reading a book. Or she would go to an educator and get that support from that person. Speaker 1 So she you gave her a tool? Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Speaker 2 I know. So when we look at the developmental milestones and the things about grasps and yeah, smiling and physical development, that's that's important. But I think that children, babies are more capable and competent than those lists. Speaker 1 Yeah, I I absolutely agree with that. Speaker 2 Here is a baby who has learnt how to regulate her emotions with the support and demonstration. Speaker 1 Yeah. And and those things, they'll learn it. You don't need a plan for the learning to happen that they hold. They'll get there if the environment supports them or in the relationships. They feel secure, they feel trusted. They feel that their voice or absent, even if they're not talking, that they're heard. Speaker 2 Yeah, their voice, their voice is heard. That was her voice. Her voice was lashing out. Her voice was, she wasn't deliberately hurting children. She was just, you know, frustrated and angry and she didn't know what to do with her feelings and she couldn't verbalise them. She, she didn't know how to be understood. So her voice was her behaviour, it was her actions. So we had to observe that, listen to that, analyse that, try and work out OK what? What might she be thinking? What might she need? No, we don't. We don't really know. Speaker 1 No. Speaker 2 What babies are thinking, they can't tell us. So we we have to do our very best guess at trying to work that out. Yeah, I always like to think, if I was that baby, how would I like to be treated if I left something at home as an adult, I'd be able to work out a plan to solve that problem. Our babies need us to work out that plan if something goes wrong for them. Speaker 1 Yeah, terrific. Implementing Flexible Routines and Valuing Baby Educators Well, let's go back. So you touched on nappy changes. So that brings us sort of to those routine moments. So how do we consider routines that can continue to support Children's Agency I? Speaker 2 Think the answer is a flexible routine. We know that babies are going to need their nappies changed. We know that they're going to need their lunch. We know that they're going to need a sleep, but not every child is following our exact timeline in their home with their parents. And we have like it is possible to have individual routines in an early childhood service. Sometimes I hear people say, oh that's fine at home, but we can't do that here. We have to have lunch at 11:00 PM, not PMAM. We have to have lunch at 11:00 AM, We have to do 4 nappy changes a day. That might be possible, but do you have to do them all at exactly the same time? Yeah. So it's going to involve listening to parents first of all to find out what's the baby's routine at home, how do you do nappy changes at home? How do you put them to bed at home? And then making sure that we can implement those in the service. People seem to think that that's a really difficult thing to do. I'm not sure why, perhaps. This is controversial. Perhaps even as adults we've been institutionalised. We think that there's a set routine, that this is the way that it's always done. Yeah, as soon as you hear this is the way it's always done, you need to question that. Speaker 1 And say why I agree. Yeah. Speaker 2 Because you hear that all the time. Yeah. So as soon as someone says we just do it this way, you have to ask why? Because if you're in a service and you've got all the babies crawling around and one of them needs a nappy change, just pick them up and take them for a nappy change. Speaker 1 Yes, because I know, I know that, you know, some services do very much like, you know, you've got 15 children in the room or 20 or whatever. However many people have and it's 11:00 and that those 20 nappies get changed. Doesn't matter what anyone's doing, it's 11:00. So that needs to happen. Or it's 12:30. It's time to sleep because the educators need to have a break. They'd like some time to reflect or do programming or clean the room or whatever it is. But in these moments, we really miss opportunities to continue to support children's agency. Speaker 2 Yeah, I have a lovely story from a student teacher. Actually, maybe being a student helped because she could stand back a little bit. There was a child who would become quite frustrated, aggressive, tearful. I just in inverted commas, couldn't do anything with him at about 10:30. So she had to think about that, about why does this behaviour always occur at 10:30? And they realised because he was tired, but lunch was at 11, so they didn't want to put him to bed because he needed to have lunch and then he needed to have his nappy change and then he was allowed to go to bed. So she had a chat to the room leader, to the kitchen, and they put him to bed at 10:30, saved his lunch and gave it to him when he woke up. And that that made him happier because he's getting his sleep needs met. But it also made all the educators happier because they didn't have to deal with all the conflict anymore. Made the other children happier because nobody's upsetting them anymore. So changing the routine slightly for one child actually made everyone's life easier? Yes. So flexible and individual routines makes the child's life better, and it makes the educator's life better. Yeah, easier. Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because yeah, you're responding to that child and we've, we've done an episode on responsiveness. And I think it's, it's really important and it goes hand in hand with being able to ensure that all children's agency is supported in the service because you you're responding. And I think that for particularly for those under 2 age group, you really need to tune in. We had one concept that I thought of, you know, just in terms of the relationship building and that relational work that you do in, in those infant rooms. We used to have this thing that we called the stay put educator. So everyone, because sometimes you find yourself with those like, you know, we had 12 and we had four educators in the room. And at some point of the day, everyone would be busy doing these really random jobs. And we're like, what are we doing? Because then the room gets louder, busier. Speaker 2 We're all. Speaker 1 Running around getting, you know, milk ready during this whatever. So we decided that we're going to do the stay put educator and they needed to stay put in a certain spot of the thing. Just stay put. And then before you knew it, they're just these wonderful, delicious, you know, 15 month olds just crawling over them, reading books, just having a good time. And we could keep going with the things that needed to be done around in other places, but we committed to that. And sometimes it was really hard. You're like, oh, because you want to be busy. You don't, you're not, you know, you're like, oh, they're, they're doing their thing or they're not doing much and you want to be busy doing the stuff that you need to do. You need to sit. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's really like that is such a great solution and I love that you've given it the title, the staple. Speaker 1 Educated. Yeah, let's. Speaker 2 Make that a thing. Yeah, I think it's really important that like in the baby's room, that actually is our planning. I remember planning once that I was going to hold the babies for 5 minutes after they woke up. So I had to communicate that to all the other staff. I'm not doing nothing, I'm not not contributing. The plan is we will hold the babies for 5 minutes after they wake up just for that transition period. Some of them were ready to go, but some of them really snuggled in in that time so that that could look like we're doing nothing. And for some reason, we really, I think we need to be seen to be being busy. So we really need to communicate. I'm going to sit now. I'm just going to be. And that's part of my job. We've really got to understand that. We've got to communicate that with the other educators. Speaker 1 I think that's great that you planned for that, because we do. We plan in a really weird way. We're like, oh, the child's interested in digging, Let's put some shovels in the sand pit. But when you're thinking about the relational work that you're doing with that birth to two, it's about planning for building those relationships and feeling them secure attachments and all of that beautiful thing that comes with that age group. I'm sorry, I love that you've planned that. Speaker 2 Yeah, we need to put caring routines into our planning. Yeah, well, actually we shouldn't need to. No, but, but it helps to communicate with the other educators, it helps to communicate with the management, with parents, even that we know what we're doing. This is the reason why we're doing these things, in order to support the development of relationships, in order to support smooth transitions, in order to create a sense of security. I will hold the babies for 5 minutes after they wake up from their sleeps. Speaker 1 Beautiful. All right, let's I'm going to ask you a closing question. What changes would you like to see in the way that we approach early childhood education to better support babies Agency It's. Speaker 2 A really good question, I think. I think everything that we've said today, but the, the idea of educators understanding the importance and significance of the work that they do would be really important. Sometimes I hear people say I want to work in the baby's room because it's easier. I actually think the baby's room is the hardest room to provide that agency to listen to behaviours. So much analysis is going on. So, so many more relationships like the, the parent relationship is even more important. So I think valuing the work that we do, understanding this importance and significance of our care routines, understanding that babies are real agentic people capable of making decisions, understanding the need for respect. So I think all of that is about learning more as educators about how to give children agency. Speaker 1 Wonderful. Thank you so much for all your insights today. Speaker 2 Thank you for having me.