The Perfect Guide For Responsive Caregiving in Infant and Toddlers

It often brings a smile to parents and the little ones while lowering stress and building little brains. Play has been such an important part of childhood, yet the opportunities to play in today’s life are shrinking. Thus, parents play an important role in shaping and providing responsive care to their infant and toddler.

Infants and toddlers are highly dependent on adults that care for them. In this case, not only parents but also caregivers that should be responsive to their needs, interests, and abilities. Because it is the beginning for infants to communicate their needs and interests. 

So, What is Responsive Care in Infant and Toddlers?

Responsive care is the process of watching and tuning into your child’s cues and figuring out what they really mean and respond to them in a sensitive way. This is the best way to meet their physical and mental needs. For example, imaginary play with toddles such as cooking, cleaning, saving the world or other activities that help a child to expand their language and emotions. Through this, parents will observe and respond to their child’s movements, sounds and gestures. Such activities not only allow the child to create situations in which they are in control, but it also allows them to explore pleasure, excitement, and enthusiasm. Besides, responsive care also includes building trust and social relationships. Before young children learn to speak, the engagement between them and their caregivers is expressed through cuddling, eye contact, smiles, vocalizations and gestures. Through this, it helps young children to understand the world around them and learn about people, relationships and language.

Why responsive care is important in the infant and toddler?

Responsive caregiving play an important role for a healthy physical and psychological development of a child. At the same time, caregivers must be sensitive towards the infant’s acts and vocalizations because we often act as the communicative signals to understand their needs and wants. Nevertheless, to ensure the child’s health and growth, caregivers need to be sensitive to the physical state of the young child, to be able to judge whether the child is hungry, tired, needs toileting or is becoming sick. Responsive caregivers who are able to make these judgements because they are responsible to monitor the child’s movements, expressions, colour, temperature, and the like. For instance, when caregivers are having fantasy play, dress up, and fort building with the little ones, it helps them to develop motor skills. In play, children are also solving problems and learning to focus attention, all of which promote the growth of executive functioning skills which is important in responsive caregiving.

Who Should be Responsible for Responsive Care in Infant and Toddler?

Although most of us today consider the parent’s presence at the time of their baby’s birth to be commonplace, this was not the case only a generation ago. Much of this change has been due to the clear benefits we see for both parents and baby by having a caregiver or a nanny. From a baby’s earliest days, the presence of an engaged, attentive caregiver or nanny can have a positive impact. And they play an important role in responsive care. Parents’ attention to and care for their babies in the early months is one way they foster a secure attachment.  But we know now that this is not the case. Babies become securely attached to multiple caregivers, especially if the other caregiver is responsive and attentive to the baby’s physical and emotional needs.

Even though, there are times both parents need to work to support their families and so child care becomes a very important issue for us. It is important to find a high-quality child care provider near our home or work who we trust to provide the kind of care you want for your child. However, not all child care provider will know responsive care. But if you’re looking for one, you should ask whether how many children each caregiver is responsible for caring for and talk to the caregivers about how they interact with the children as well as how they make sure they are all cared for throughout the day. Even if they are not familiar with the term “responsive care” they may be very good at making sure their kids are well cared for and that they are happy and secure. Hence, not only parents are responsible for responsive care in infant and toddler, but also the caregivers or childcare.

What Are The Examples of Responsive Care?

Being responsive to infants’ through communicating.
Responsive caregiving in infants’ is an overall development that cannot be overstated because it fosters healthy brain development and increases the likelihood of infants to achieve cognitive-language and social-emotional milestones. For instance, being responsive to infants’ through communication. More often than not, infants try to communicate with us through cries, gurgles, babbles and chuckles. There are even times when they smile, frown, point or holding their arms up to communicate with us.

In this care, responsive caregivers should be familiar with such subtle signals.

Identifying infants’ feelings.
Besides that, assigning each child a primary caregiver promotes one-on-one relationships that help babies thrive. Through this, it helps baby to develop trust towards their primary caregiver as they learn to respond appropriately to baby’s unique temperament, needs and interests by being the one who almost always diapers her, feeds her, puts her to sleep, and communicates with her family. The child’s security deepens as her primary caregiver develops a positive relationship with her family and comes to know their values and wishes for their child while providing responsive care towards the baby.

Talking during infant and caregiver routines.
Rather than silently and quickly changing a diaper, responsive caregivers take advantage of routine caregiving activities to provide individualized attention. For instance, letting the child know what you are doing even when you’re changing their diapers. Because an active and responsive caregiver takes cues from each child to know when to expand on the child’s initiative when to guide, when to teach and when to intervene. Responsive care recognizes signs of stress in the child and takes appropriate action to adapt to the child’s needs while interact with them routinely.