The statement "a professional‘s approach should be a process rather than a recipe" meaning doing things with structure than just in order. Many childcare centers have curriculums and schedules that they follow daily and monthly. Which is provided by the director or early childhood professional.
This informs the caregiver or teacher what they are schedule to do with the children each day like a "recipe" and it repeats each day with no changes. As professionals we can add varies strategies that will help make the curriculum and schedule very exciting that it grasp the interest of infants/toddlers while they are learning how to eat and enjoying their food.
I agree with this thinking, because I'm always trying to find a way that will help encourage young children to try different ways to do positive things which are challenging along with following the childcare center guidelines and schedules.
Eating is one of the essential needs that all human beings share-but how and what people eat is linked to culture and family. "Routines are an important context through which cultural knowledge is transmitted" (How Culture Shapes Social-Emotional Development, p.13).
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A professional is someone trained to possess certain skills to solve particular day-to-day problems. A process is a gradual step-by-step way of executing a task. A recipe is a fixed structured set of instructions that guide how a task should be performed.
A professional's approach in early childhood education should, therefore, involve multiple steps where the professional starts by understanding the child's behavior first before he or she strives to alter a certain attribute to suit the set standards (Bhavnagri & Gonzalez-Mena, 1997).
This is achieved through first establishing proper relationships with the child, then taking into considering factors that influence feeding and sleeping behaviors in a particular child and finally he or she tries to modify specific factors with the aim of transforming one behavior to another.
When the professional's approach is a recipe, he or she focuses only on aligning the child to the strict rules set by the institution without taking into consideration why the child is behaving in a certain way. This creates a conflict between the culture of the child and the rules of the certain that may eventually lead to antisocial behavior.
I agree that a professional should use a process rather than a recipe to solve the conflict between the child's family practices and the caregiving practices. A child behaves best when there's a set routine. However, in order to prime a routine in a child, it takes time. The routine acts as the child's day-to-day clock (Epstein, 2018).
If a child knows this comes after this, it becomes effortless to control a child. In order to create a routine, it takes time and conditioning. Therefore, to change a previously set routine such as sleeping and eating times, the caregiver will have to use a modifiable process to instill the new behavior.
Moreover, creating relationships among the children will help influence each other's behavior. A new child should be allowed to socialize freely with the older children (Morrison, 2013). To achieve a proper relationship, the child goes through transitions to develop the confidence to mingle freely with strangers (Singer, 2013). Once the relationship is achieved, it's easy to align a child's behavior to the rest.