Child Health & Safety Summary

Video Transcript

Hi! This is Patti Billings. I am a certified pediatric nurse practitioner on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip, we are going to give an overview of child health and childcare. Quality early child care and education involves the care that the child receives at home, the care they may receive at a relative or the care they may receive in a paid childcare center. It promotes their development and their learning and just their optimum health, both mental and physical. A child who can develop and play and run develops physically and has challenging situations develops emotionally. I think a child needs a variety of experiences, they need some indoor play and some outdoor play, they need to play with things that develop their fine motor coordination, like clay and colors and things like that and be able to play outside and run and play on the swings and ride tricycles and so forth. You know, children, who are raised by a stay at home parent have the advantage of having their primary care giver with them all the time and get to know them well. It doesn’t necessarily mean they would get a good quality of early experiences and early learning experiences. I think the quality is the most important thing rather than the time that a parent spends with a child. I have seen a variety of situations where children just thrive at home and their parents are very involved in teaching them things, they have a lot of interactive play and learning experiences. So, those children just thrive and I think that’s probably the absolute idea. But, unfortunately, most parents don’t have that opportunity to do that. You know, we have many two income families and parents have to both work and so they have to find childcare. You know, a nice grandma is wonderful. If you have a grandma who is not working also and she will give probably very similar care. At the same time considering the experiences that she can offer the child, when a child gets to be about three, I think that it’s important that they have more social experiences with other children. Up until that time, a solo caregiver is not a problem for most children, but at three, they really need to have some play experiences and by 3-4, they need to start learning some organized learning activities because kindergarten now expects children to know certain skills, when they go to kindergarten. Most of them need to know their colors; they need to know to write their name, they need to recognize most of the letters of the alphabet. They need to be able to attend for a time period where they can sit and work on some work at a table and follow a kind of group instructions. It is recess time, it is lunch time, and it is time to work on our math or whatever. When you go to kindergarten, they expect a lot of those things are already in play.

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