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Looking for a gentle, supportive gathering of adults who are important to young children? Join us! We meet twice a month via Zoom (2nd and 4th Thursdays @ 7:30pm EST) and chat via keyboard on a safe, private platform whenever we want. Click for details → https://www.jodiwert.com/yes/community. A prompt for conversation = blog post(its) like this: @Adriana van Altvorst @Melissa McPheeters

March 10,2021 Editor’s note: This article includes CLASP estimates on child care relief funding each state, D.C., and Puerto Rico will receive of the $39 billion included in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARP Act) For decades, our country has had a child care crisis fraught with inequitable access for communities of color, unaffordable care for far too many families, poverty-level wages for early educators, and razorthin margins for providers. This long-term crisis has been exacerbated by the...

Raising an infant can be very consuming and upending, especially for new parents. Babies have needs that are confusing and different, and there are times when nothing a parent does will sooth the baby. In this episode of Delusional Optimism, Dr. B and co-host Seth Creekmore discuss how to survive those early years and share what babies need from birth to 24 months. Listen to some common parenting myths that are harmful and misleading.

By Karen D'Souza, EdSource, April 6, 2021 Children are born ready to learn. In the first year of life, the brain doubles, with about 90% of brain growth happening before kindergarten. However, only 1 in 3 eligible children under 5 years old take part in California’s publicly funded early learning and care programs. To make matters worse this year, 3 out of 4 California parents with children under 5 are worried their education and development will suffer because of the pandemic, according to...

Registration is available for the April workshop, Dismantling White Supremacy in the Classroom - Virtual and In-Person. Register at http://bit.ly/riseapril For full transparency: the workshop will be led by myself, a white person, and will reference content from Black and Brown sources. I will compensate sources for their labor to the greatest extent that I can. The workshop is scheduled for 1.5 hours with a five minute break included and will be recorded. A copy of the recording and slides...

Originally posted on Rise to Resilience. "Change is the end result of all true learning." - Leo Buscaglia I first learned of the triune, or three-part, model of the brain when researching Adverse Childhood Experiences and Resilience which became the original Rise to Resilience presentation. Since then, I encountered the triune brain model regularly: Conscious Discipline uses it as a foundational concept. Dr. Dan Siegel's Hand Model of the Brain and the "flipping your lid" analogy. And in...

When a child welcomes you into their life, honor that. Hold that in the highest regard because on that day you have not only become a friend, but a glimmer of hope. You represent a world where people don’t make empty promises, tell lies, or disappear without a warning. In the eyes of a child who is more familiar with grief than joy, you very well could be the key to the elusive stability they have always heard about, but never known.

This was originally posted on my Rise to Resilience blog on March 17th. You can view that post on my blog here , as well as see the newest post that answered "what is the opposite of power and control?" (The answer: personal responsibility and empowerment.) Survival sometimes means not responding to oppressive behavior directly. To do so could result in physical harm to oneself, even death." - Beverly Daniel Tatum Some folks close to me are aware of what I have been experiencing at work over...

By Jessica Grose, The New York Times, March 17, 2021 If your child is not potty trained, how many diapers do you have on hand right now? That’s a question I certainly wouldn’t have been able to answer with any specificity when my children were babies. But it’s a question that parents who struggle to afford the expense — about $70-$80 per month, per baby — can answer easily, because managing diaper need is among their most significant anxieties. That’s what a new study from Jennifer Randles,...

It’s truly been a year like no other since we issued a statement in March 2020 about the COVID-19 pandemic that was rapidly sweeping around the world. Our primary aim for that statement was to honor first responders, health care workers, and front-line service providers—especially those supporting young children and their families. A year later, that tribute needs to be redoubled and tripled. The enormous efforts that have been made on behalf of others are awe-inspiring. We also made two...

Head Start and Early Head Start continue to lead the way in promoting school readiness and family engagement for vulnerable young children. It’s no surprise, then, that Head Start is increasingly focused on implementing trauma-informed care (TIC). A recent study adds timely relevance to the advancement of trauma-informed care in Head Start preschool settings. The study, published in School Mental Health , “examines the relationship between trauma-informed training content, trauma-informed...

In the summer of 2020, the Tennessee Early Childhood Training Alliance (TECTA) at Austin Peay University, reached out asking me to provide several professional development opportunities for early childhood educators statewide after being awarded grant funding. TECTA leadership requested that I deliver a training I had used in July of 2020 when training the childcare leadership of the state of Mississippi. The training entitled, Using a Trauma Informed Approach in Early Childhood Education ,...