Welcome to my blog about my experiences working in early childhood. I have called it Nurturing Forests because I believe that raising children is not a isolated activity but takes a whole community.



As early childhood professionals, we are actively involved in this process but we also need to work closely with the children, parents, community as a whole and other allied professionals.



I hope you enjoy my site. I also have a facebook site of the same name where I provide links to useful sites for teachers, parents and others interested in the early childhood: www.facebook.com/nurturingforests



Friday, February 22, 2013

Building a sense of trust with families






Having recently embarked on my child protection course - I know a bit slow off the mark getting that done. One of the things I found most rewarding from the very high quality Community Child Care Cooperative (or CCCC for short) course was the great discussion on ethical practice and building a sense of confidentiality at your centre.

The trainer argued that in order to build a sense of trust and confidentiality in your centre, you needed to build a sense of trust and confidence in everything you do. For example, if a family mentioned in the morning that they had been to the zoo on the weekend - Instead of going around and telling everyone and getting very excited about links to home on your program (I know I'm guilty of it) she suggested that instead you ask the family first if they are ok with you sharing this information with others.

Her point was that if you do this with non-personal information when the family have more personal or private information to tell you they are more willing to share as they know not every person at the centre is going to know - which is obviously critical with child protection issues.

While I had never really thought of it this way before, I think she has an excellent point. Building trust with your families that you respect them and are willing not to 'talk out of school' about them is a very important part of building quality partnerships within.

I believe it is a very large part of our role to share our knowledge and skills with family about issues that face them... whether it be contacts, information or referrals I think this attitude could really help in building this aspect of our roles (and recognition of our skills in this area)

What do you think of this issue?

How do you build a sense of trust and confidentiality with families at your centre?

If you are a parent, what have you found builds your confidence in your centre to share information?





Photo Source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/valpearl/5103209989/