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Infant Programs in Australian Childcare Centres: Are there

Gaps in Pre-service Training of Childcare Staff?

Berenice Nyland

Paper presented at 8th Australian Institute of Family Studies Conference, February

2003.

Contact details:

Faculty Education, Language and Community Services

Department School and Early Childhood Education

RMIT University

PO Box 71,

Bundoora, 3083

Email: berenice.Nyland@rmit.edu.au

Telephone: 03 9925 7805

Fax: 03 99257887

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Infant Programs in Australian Childcare Centres: Are there

Gaps in Pre-service Training of Childcare Staff?

Abstract

This paper discusses the potential of the child-care centre as a child-rearing niche. The

paper is based on research carried out in child-care centres. The everyday experiences of

infants were recorded on video over a period of eighteen months. These experiences were

coded using a number of communicative language categories as well as examining

caregiver use of routines and provision of cultural artefacts. A detailed description of the

two infants in the particular developmental niche emerged.

Following on from this examination of everyday life for an infant in a child-care centre

the paper explores the potential of the child-care centre as a context that supports the

child’s growth and development. Earlier studies (eg. Smith, 1999) revealed that

incidences of joint attention, valued in the development literature, were minimal. Do

child-care staff who work with infants need special training in pre-verbal

communication? Does the group care arrangement contain alternative forms of

stimulation that make one-on-one interactions with adults less important? These are two

questions explored in the light of the infants’ recorded daily experiences.

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Introduction

Having explored infant experiences in child-care centres and children’s emotional

experiences, Leavitt (1995) concluded the regulative norms of formal childcare are based

on adult beliefs about children’s needs and desirable behaviours. This concentration on

observed behaviours Leavitt finds problematic as she considers it may impact on the

infants’ developing sense of self (1994). Leavitt also notes that the caregiver relationship

to the infant is very different from that of a family member and suggests that caregivers

working with infants should be trained to communicate more effectively with pre-verbal

children. This suggestion is based on assumptions about children’s vulnerability and

children’s needs that arise from attachment theory (Penn, 1999). An alternative way of

viewing the question of a caregiver’s ability to communicate with infants could be to take

the view of children as powerful communicators who from an early age can make their

messages quite clear (Trevarthen, 1980; Rinaldi, 2001). The first question would then

become why don’t we listen to pre-verbal infants in childcare settings?

The second question suggested a need to explore what experiences and relations children

actually encounter in their daily lives in childcare. If interactions and joint attention with

adults is important in a child’s development then there may exist a difficulty in group

care settings with ratios of five babies per caregiver (eg. Rolfe, Nyland & Morda, 2002).

However, reviews of the literature (eg Ochiltree, 1994; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2001)

support the idea that non-parental childcare does not disrupt the infant-parent bond or

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developmental outcomes. Where children are in high quality childcare centres it has even

been found that such programs can have an ameliorating effect against risk factors in the

home, like maternal poverty or depression, (NICHD Early Child Research Network,

1997). Other factors are increasingly being studied. One of these is the nature of peer

relations (Penn, 1999) and how more competent peers may play an important role in

scaffolding the infant’s growing knowledge of language and culture. Many practitioners

are also showing an increased interest in environmental factors like aesthetics (Caldwell,

1997). In this paper it is argued factors like aesthetics, use of time and space, language,

peer relations and an awareness of children and caregivers’ rights should be explored in

future studies if childcare centres are to become better places for children and caregivers.

If there are contradictions between theory and practice, as there would appear to be, then

there is a need to seek praxis by examining the beliefs that theory and practice are based

upon and study how these beliefs are manifest in the context of childcare. Attachment

theory and aspects of sociocultural theory are discussed in this paper in relation to their

application to the childcare context. An observation of an infant in a childcare centre is

used as an example of daily experience.

The paper discusses the sociocultural notions of the developmental niche, defined below,

and joint attention and relates the discussion to an infant’s observed experience. Texts

and training materials are referred to that indicate attachment theory, as well as

sociocultural theory, is very influential in the early childhood literature (Ochiltree, 1994;

Nixon & Gould, 1999; Penn, 2000; Young, 2002). As researchers query the nature of the

dialogue between theory and practice (Penn, 2000) there is also the issue of differing

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theories having the potential to create tensions and confusion instead of informing and

enriching practice. How practice informs theory is also a relationship that requires in-

depth investigation.

The Developmental Niche and Joint Attention

Childcare can be described as a developmental niche or context for development. The

term developmental niche refers to a sociocultural view that seeks to describe context as a

three-part system. These three inter-related parts consist of the physical environment, use

of cultural artefacts and the psychology of the caregivers (Super & Harkness, 1986; Cole,

1996). The physical environment refers to both the physical and social setting and

cultural artefacts can be as varied as use of time, space and language as well as particular

objects like toys, books, mobiles and the like. The third part, the psychology of the

caregivers refers to the caregivers’ history, formative experiences and own theories about

infancy. These will influence both physical provision of care and the relationships that

develop within the group setting.

Each institution in our society, for example schools, hospitals or banks, has culture and

practice based on their history, beliefs, values and relationship to the wider society. In the

same way childcare has developed practices built on beliefs and attitudes that are context

–specific. The infant within the context of the childcare centre is encountering the culture

of the wider society through the filter of the institution of childcare. This can be of

concern if the theory of infancy that exists within the institution does not acknowledge

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the competence and knowledge the infant brings. One of the important competencies of

the infant is pre-verbal communicative competence. The infant can share in reciprocal

exchanges with adults or peers within the child-care context. When these interactions

involve a focus external to the two players the experience is known as joint attention. The

infant and caregiver, or the infant and another child, actively engage in referential

actions, like pointing, social referencing, labelling, and eventually use decontextualised

words and gestures with a shared focus on absent events (Adamson & McArthur, 1995).

Examples of these developments are that the infant first focuses on the face of a

significant other but quickly learns to follow the other’s movements visually. By six

months the child is responsive to objects and event names as well as intonational patterns.

The child’s intentional communicative repertoire extends and increasingly shared

communication becomes symbolic as it is established within the form of spoken

language. Through joint attention children become meaning makers and help create and

recreate the culture. It is through joint attention that the infant, as a novice in the culture,

gains a sense of otherness and therefore of self and an awareness that others have

intentions and points of view. These understandings are considered significant in the

development of cognitive, linguistic and cultural awareness (Owens, 2001).

Infant Experiences of Joint Attention in the Child-care Context

The research on which this paper is based was a study that involved observing children

in childcare nurseries over a period of eighteen months. The children’s joint attentional

experiences were transcribed from video data. The collated data indicated the children

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met expected levels of communicative competence and awareness as described in the

child development texts (eg. Cole & Cole, 1996; Berk, 2000; Owens, 2001) and in the

joint attention literature (eg. Moore & Dunham, 1995). However the children’s recorded

experiences of joint attentional sequences were minimal with both adults and peers within

the setting. The two children were effective meaning makers and, as early childhood

curriculum is everything that happens across the day, we can ask what these children, as

active communicators, were learning in the environment of child-care? In other words to

take everyday experience into account and see the child as:

a whole that is an ongoing, historically constituted, forward-looking individual

person within a social-cultural matrix (Nelson, 1996: 325).

It then becomes important to study the niche and the child within what Nelson refers to as

the sociocultural matrix. The following is an example of an observation that was recorded

during a three-month pilot study carried out for the research. A child sitting in a high

chair was recorded on video. An infant left in a highchair is a common enough childcare

event that Ebbeck and Winter (2003) labelled babies sitting in highchairs as "waiting".

This was a category Ebbeck and Winter used in a study on quality in childcare centres

that observed children’s activity across the day. For this present paper the recorded

observation of the child in the highchair is described followed by a discussion on what

and why this situation was occurring.

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Observation

A, 14 months, is sitting in a highchair. She has a lidded cup in front of her. There are two

empty highchairs next to her and then further down another baby in a chair. The room is

noisy and two tables have children sitting at them eating morning tea. Two caregivers

move around the room serving the children.

A leans towards the video camera and gives a smile. She repeats the lean twice and then

vocalises. She looks across the room towards the carers and then looks back at the camera

and points to the person holding the camera. She repeats this pointing a number of times

emphatically. A then leans back in the chair and squirms. She has a look of extreme

displeasure on her face. She tries to undo the buckle of the strap. She then tries to pull the

strap down over her shoulder. She leans towards the camera holding out her arms. A puts

her fingers in her mouth and gazes across the room. She does this for almost a full

minute. She then turns back to the camera, smiles and points at the other child in a

highchair and says “bubba”. As she sees children leaving the room she points to the

outside and vocalises. She then arches herself in the chair. She sits back quietly. The

caregiver has finished with the other children and comes over. The caregiver asks, “are

you finished” does not leave space for an answer, wipes A’s face and lifts her to the

ground.

Discussion

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A has actively voiced her desire to be helped out of the high chair. She has used

vocalisations, facial expression, smiles, modelling, eye contact, body movements,

gestures and two different types of pointing, instrumental and personal, to no avail. As

she is safely tied into the high chair her requests are ignored whilst older, more mobile

children are attended to first. When the caregiver comes over there is no

acknowledgement that A’s message has been received or understood. She has her face

wiped mechanically and is taken from the chair.

There was no joint attention, no sharing of a goal and A could not tell if she had been

understood. Joint attention influences the child’ representational system which in turn

helps the child develop a sense of self, sense of others, a world view and a view of a

child’s place in the world. In this case lack of joint attention may suggest lack of power

for the child. The child lacked the power to make herself heard and lacked the power to

achieve what she wanted without help. Such experiences can have an intergenerational

effect. The child is experiencing and interpreting cultural practices. For the adult these

practices are made up of the adult’s remembered past, the imagined future the adult has

for the child and the lived present (Cole, 1996). Cole paraphrases White’s comment

about babies:

They come bathed in the concepts their community holds about babies just as

surely as they come bathed in amniotic fluid (1996:184).

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A is actively encountering the social image of the child that exists in this context. If this

social construct of the child is the “cornerstone” of our child-rearing, child-caring

practices (Rinaldi, 1993:102) then lack of joint attention can have a long-term effect. A’s

image of the infant and her experience will influence her attitudes and beliefs about

infancy and will potentially impact on her relationships with infants in the future.

What were the factors influencing caregiver decisions about provision of care for A?

There were practical and structural reasons for A to be left in her high chair. She was

safely tied in and therefore was not going to engage in harmful activity. Except for

“bubba” all the other children were mobile and moving around the room. In the interests

of safety these mobile children were attended to first. This structural necessity contradicts

the childcare rhetoric that infants have individualised care and routines like rest, food and

play happen on demand. These contradictions need to be explored in order to be able to

articulate the beliefs and attitudes that dominate practice in the childcare setting. Leavitt

(1995) identified the childcare centre as being diametrically different to the home setting.

However, there is a prevailing rhetoric that states practice should be designed to be as

homelike as possible (eg. Wilson, 1990). Much discussion of family relations is based on

principles like unconditional love that come from attachment theory (eg. Hennessy,

Martin, Moss & Melhuish, 1992). If the childcare centre is not homelike and if structural

constraints make it difficult for infants to be reciprocal members of the childcare culture

then perhaps Penn (1999) is correct and attachment theory is not a useful base for

practice in the "real" world of childcare. This suggests the need to question the

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assumption that attachment theory is the best approach for the childcare centre to

embrace when designing practices and relationships (Gowrie Adelaide, 2001).

Attachment Theory – Caregiver Training and Influence on Practice

In the observation cited A would appear to not be accorded participation rights in the

context of morning tea at the childcare centre (Federation of Community Legal Centres

Vic. Inc., 2001). In a paper that reviewed theory, training and practice in the care of

children outside their homes Penn (1999) examined some of the theories and assumptions

that influence practices in the care of children under three years of age. Penn discussed

different cultural groups and childrearing practices and related these to theories of

attachment, autonomy and interdependence. It is attachment theory that she identifies as

promoting an individualistic Anglo-American image of the baby. When looked at in the

light of lived experience in the childcare context Penn considers our use of attachment

theory to be misplaced. Attachment theory is predicated on the idea that the infant-mother

relationship is critical to future mental health. This very notion challenges the idea of

women working away from the home and infants being placed in non-parental care and is

therefore a strange beginning for designing good quality childcare centres.

Similar to Leavitt (1995) Penn is arguing that the nature of the experience that is

observed in childcare centres is different to the home. However, where Leavitt would

promote the idea of closer and more nurturing relationships, Penn questions whether this

is possible. The mother is not present and therefore attachment theory as a basis for

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practice can be questioned. This is a useful point of view to bring to the debates about

childcare and discussions about quality. Questioning the use of attachment theory is

especially relevant to Australia as attachment theory, along with sociocultural theory, is

widely referred to in training courses as a theoretical foundation on which to base the

design of practice. The Australian text by Nixon and Gould (1999) is an example of the

place attachment theory is given in child development studies and a recent series of

training videos for present and future caregivers in childcare centres is yet another

(Gowrie Adelaide, 2001). Produced by one of the Gowrie Centres this training material

identifies attachment theory as one of the most significant concepts childcare staff should

acquire in their training.

One of the most important considerations in the care of babies and toddlers is to

ensure that their attachment needs are met. Child care professionals require a

practical understanding of attachment theory (Gowrie Adelaide, 2001, p.1).

Some of the influences of attachment theory that can be seen in today’s nursery are an

emphasis on object permanence, routines, primary caregiving arrangements and self

esteem (Gowrie Adelaide, 2001). Each of these influences can be examined in relation to

belief and practice. The first, object permanence is related to the young child’s

knowledge and awareness of the world. Such awareness develops spontaneously through

development and experience unless the child has a sensory impairment (Raver, 1999).

Whilst most trained staff can discuss object permanence it is from the Piagetian view of

manipulation of objects and the growth of the child's conceptual understanding that

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objects have an independent existence through time and space (Nixon & Gould, 1999).

Sociocultural theory also acknowledges the role the concept of object permanence plays

in development and goes beyond the Piagetian approach. Such a perspective Nelson

(1996) says is static. She suggests that instead of observing a child's actions with objects

each experience can be viewed as an event and the child can be seen to acquire

differentiated object knowledge that involves relating to objects as part of both the

physical and social worlds. This encourages the child to categorise and organise

knowledge in relation to sequence, temporal order and causal relations within specific

contexts.

When the focus is upon objects qua objects, it is possible to conceive of the object

world in static, even abstract, terms. But when the emphasis is on events, this is

not possible. Moreover, when the focus is upon objects, they can be conceived of

as physical entities independent of all social and cultural meanings. Events,

however, are always socially and culturally particular (Nelson, 1996:96).

The second influence, routines within childcare centres, has been discussed in an earlier

paper (Nyland, 2002). This paper on routines concluded that cultural messages, within

routines that caregivers had deliberately and carefully designed, were largely to do with

power relations and levels of compliance by the children. Although ideas of co-operation,

collaboration and reciprocity are common in the early childhood literature observed

practice for this research suggested routines were adult-directed with an aim to

encouraging particular types and levels of participation.

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Penn (1999) chose to observe how primary caregiving was implemented across a series

of studies carried out in the UK. The primary caregiver system means a child is assigned

to a primary caregiver who will be responsible for the child's observations, plans and

records, The centres observed by Penn had a one-to-three ratio. This is excellent in

comparison to most Australian centres. Even with the one-to-three ratio Penn’s study

found that the ratio of caregivers and babies meant that staff had to be flexible and

constantly move around to cover fluctuating numbers of children, staff on sick leave,

rostered days off etc. Attendance patterns, caused by cost, part-time work and parental

choice, also meant many children were part-time. A sixty place child-care centre can be

catering for up to one hundred and fifty families at any one time. Penn observes:

I found that where a key worker system was in principle in place, in practice,

because of everyday contingencies, it could rarely operate as intended; in effect it

was a useful fiction, a convenient lip-service to attachment theory

(unpaged:1999).

The fourth influence of attachment theory listed at the beginning of this section was self-

esteem. Self- esteem is described as “children’s evaluation of their worth in positive or

negative terms” (Essa, 1999: 484). Katz (2003) has said that:

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Children with a healthy sense of self-esteem feel that the important adults in their

lives accept them, care about them, and would go out of their way to ensure that

they are safe and well (unpaged).

The foundations of self-esteem begin at birth and are connected to the attachment the

child develops for significant others. One way of developing trust is to give the young

child unconditional attention. This means that the environment is not just responsive but

also initiates attention that is not related to observed behaviour (Essa, 1999). This would

be a problem in a childcare centre as research already indicates interactions are often

minimal (Smith, 1999; Rolfe, Nyland & Morda, 2002; Nyland, 2002). However, infants

from a few weeks are aware of different environments and can differentiate by six

months caregivers who are more likely to interact with them (Farran, Burchinal, Hutaff &

Ramey, 1984). However, the study by Farran et al (1984) found no evidence of the

formation of attachment bonds with caregivers in childcare even though the infants

responded more positively to some caregivers than others. Farren et al, cite Fowler who

in 1975 had observed a similar phenomenon and explained:

The core problem (in infant day care) is the finite availability of adult energy and

the distribution of adult attention. Competence and motivation can only go so far

in organizing the distribution of attention (Farran et al, 1984: pp. 155 –156).

For many years critics of childcare for the very young, (eg. Belsky, 1984, 1990) and

those designing programs (eg. Gowrie Adelaide 2001), have used attachment theory to

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either justify their disquiet, as in the case of Belsky, or to support their claims as to what

is high quality provision. Penn (1999) suggests that for childcare attachment theory may

actually be a constraint as it is questionable whether the required relationships will be

established in the childcare environment. If we rely on something that sounds good but

can’t work research and practice will be constrained by constantly reporting on the lack

of events like joint attention.

Another point that could be made is that self-esteem is not the same as self-concept. Self-

concept refers to the infant’s awareness of her/himself as a separate entity. This

awareness develops as the infant gains knowledge of others as intentional agents who

have differing world-views. Therefore, self-concept develops through a sense of the

other. A child’s ability to recognise themselves in a mirror is a unique human expression

of this sense of self. Self-esteem however relates to how we feel about ourselves. It is

with the concept of self-esteem that we can perhaps see Penn’s (1999) individualistic

Anglo-American image of the baby. Armed with Erikson’s psychosocial theory the child

is seen as struggling to gain trust, autonomy and independence in order to feel confident

and have strong self-esteem (Berk, 2000). Sociocultural theory, in contrast, emphasises

context, belonging, interconnectedness and interdependence. It is the difference between

autonomy and interdependence that Rinaldi (1993) identified as the greatest challenge to

reconciling the two theoretical approaches.

Discussion

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A recent review of childcare quality research for the World Bank (Love, Schochet &

Meckstroth, 2002) started from the premise that there is no one accepted theoretical or

practical base for the provision of services for the very young. The authors stated that by

1990 research was suggesting that a view had emerged that childcare has a “myriad of

incarnations” (Lamb & Sternberg cited in Love et al, 2002: 146) One of these

incarnations is that childcare can play a complementary role as regards attachment to

significant others and to support parent-child relationships and family culture. Such a

complementary role would support the development of resilience in the young child

(Egeland, 1997) and recognise the importance of experiences that children bring to

childcare from other contexts. As resilience receives more attention in the research

literature (eg. Shonkoff & Phillips, 2001) the above view of the infant as an active

mediator of culture can be juxtaposed against an image of the vulnerable child.

According to attachment theory an infant in childcare can be seen as a weak, needy child

as the mother is not there to champion the cause of her child. This is a cultural historical

view that would find a resonance in attachment theory but is this historical view still

relevant? Is this the only view of infancy? Do views of infancy and relationships differ

across families and cultures? The observation of the child in the highchair and the

discussion about attachment theory highlights the need to study infants in context (Graue

& Walsh, 1995). Much of the childcare research does not examine daily lives and much

of the infant-toddler research fails to give children a voice. The differences between

rhetoric and observed reality can disadvantage children and caregivers. If practice is not

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theoretically grounded then caregivers are in the thankless position of always striving to

achieve what is perhaps not possible.

The first question raised in this paper was “Do staff who work with infants need special

training in pre-verbal communication?”. The question was then rephrased once an image

of the communicative and competent child was superimposed. The child A in the

observation is one such child. A clearly stated her needs and desires and her feelings

about failing to achieve her ends. She was pre-verbal and able to use a repertoire of

communicative acts to express her opinion. In this instance her communications were

instrumental, regulatory and personal (Halliday, 1975). The child was not listened to for

structural, not process, reasons. It would therefore appear that this is a much more

complex issue than the adjustment of training. Training, research and practice are needed

to inquire into the relationship between practice and theory, theory and theory, and

rhetorical statements and practice.

The second question posited the suggestion that the child-care setting might contain

alternative stimulation than one-to-one interactions with caring adults. It was suggested

that as the recommended stimulation of individual attention was not taking place and

research suggested that children were not harmed by good quality care (Ochiltree, 1994;

Shonkoff & Phillips, 200; Love et al, 2002) then there is a need to further explore the

everyday experiences that do occur within the context of child-care and discuss these

experiences in relation to quality and potential impact on a child’s well-being.

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Conclusion – Implications for the Childcare Setting

This paper has discussed two influential theories that are applied to the design of formal

childcare settings and has provided a practical example of lived experience within this

setting. The picture that has emerged is a difficult one that requires attention. If

sociocultural theory and attachment theory are founded on very different social constructs

of the child can they co-exist easily? If not then are we still “doing” attachment theory

and calling it sociocultural theory? Does socio cultural theory offer a way of examining

the meaning of daily experience that is more flexible than attachment theory. If the three

systems of the developmental niche are considered does this sociocultural framework

have the potential to be used as a tool so that children’s, and caregivers,’ lives, within the

context of childcare, can be analysed and changed. Each of the three system can be seen

as an intervention point where changes in values, beliefs and practices will impact on the

environment. Penn (1999) has observed the importance of peer relationships for infants

and toddlers. Until recently infants and toddlers were not considered capable of co-

operative exchanges. The research on intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1980) and joint

attention (Bruner, 1983; Adamson & McArthur, 1995) has now firmly established the

communicative infant with an awareness of another’s intentions and points of view

within the literature. It is time to take this child and place the child in an environment that

encourages choice, free exploration and access to a range of relationships.

In the introduction some of the factors affecting the developmental niche mentioned were

aesthetics, use of time, space and cultural artefacts, peer relations and an awareness of

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children and caregiver rights. Each of these dimensions is visible in the three systems of

the developmental niche and need considerable attention. As research into daily

experience of infants in care increases there will be an opportunity to design group care

that better provides for staff, children and families.

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