Assessing Interactions and Relationships in Infant Toddler Care

• In Event: Creating Respectful Caring Cultures From Birth to Three: Moving From Research to Policy

Abstract

The quality of interactions and relationships between very young children and their non-parental caregivers in child care has been the focus of best practice recommendations in the fields of child care, early education, and early intervention for some time. Yet the research evidence for strong connections between specific aspects of interactions or relationships and infants’ and toddlers’ development is still quite scarce. Child development researchers studying early social emotional development have focused primarily on mother-child attachment. When researchers have examined caregiver-infant relationships in child care, the attachment security is often the only relationship dimension studied.

We argue in this paper for a broader, more comprehensive theoretical frame work to guide the study of infant-toddler child care relationships-- one that includes attachment security, but also considers other important aspects of daily interactions and relationships that may provide vital experiences for young children’s development. Employing a comparative analysis of the dimensions of interactions as viewed in two recent observation scales, the Toddler CLASS™ and the Cargiver Interaction Profile (CIP), we suggest six dimensions that deserve closer attention by researchers: sensitive-responsiveness; support for autonomy; emotional tone; cognitive/language stimulation; structuring/limit setting; and promoting positive peer relationships. We examine current evidence that each of these dimensions provides important experiences and inputs for infants and toddlers in child care, and we also discuss how recommended educational practices such as continuity of care and primary caregiving could provide structural support for high quality interactions along these dimensions.

Finally, we describe a recent developmental field test of the Caregiver Interaction Profile (CIP) as a framework for coaching caregivers’ interactions with infants, toddlers, and young children. The CIP was developed and validated in the Netherlands, where it has been used in large national studies to describe current caregiver-child interactions. Using five caregiver-coach case studies, we summarize the results of this field test, which included introduction to the CIP aspects of interaction, caregiver self-assessment, video examples, observations and feedback by the coach, collaborative planning for change, and consultative evaluations.

Authors

• James Elicker, Purdue University

• Ji Young Choi, Purdue University

• Treshawn Anderson, Purdue University