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What is responsive caregiving? The straightforward term for responsive caregiving is that you respond to your child's cues with warmth and support.
The bond between infant and caregiver is crucial in nurturing our infants and toddlers. Responsive caregiving practice allows you to pay attention to a child’s direct and indirect behaviours and enables you to respond appropriately to meet the child’s needs.
Eventually, if you have more than one child under your care, responsive caring practices will enable you to realise that each child is unique in their ways. Each brings a unique set of preferences and needs, allowing you to respond appropriately to each different child!
Moreover, engaging in responsive caregiving practices will show the child that you are acknowledging his desire for his cues and needs to be met, making the child feel valued and prioritised. As a result, this will enable the child to feel safe, knowing that a trusted adult will support him. The child will then be candid with his needs and thrive under a caring adult's support when appropriate.
After all, we all need someone for support - children are no different from that.
Using responsive caring practices can also help reduce your child's brain impairment risk and promote the development of his brain and socio-emotional development.
So now you know all the benefits of responsive caregiving practices - how about the process? What can you do to ensure that you use responsive caregiving whenever you interact with your child?
Observe their behaviour.
The first thing you could do is just by reading their behaviour cues - what they are doing and what they are saying are all valuable behaviour cues that can help you match the child’s interaction and behaviour style. This will enable you to interact better with the children.
As you observe their behaviour, you can infer from their behaviour and wonder what they are doing and trying to tell you from their verbal and non-verbal actions.
Respond!
Once you have deciphered what they are doing and am trying to tell you, you are ready to engage in a delightful conversation with your children!
As you engage with your children, remember to express your emotions suited for the conversation you guys are having (maintaining constant eye contact, smiling appropriately, nodding). This will ensure that the child you are interacting with knows that you recognise his speech and will feel more comfortable and at ease when communicating, eventually making him feel more confident as he converses with others!
As you respond, make sure you are available to the child you are interacting with. This can be hard, especially when you have multiple children under your care, but a simple way to do this is to acknowledge his cues and tell him that you will get back to him as soon as you are accessible in a warm tone. That way, he will know that his cues and needs are not just shunned away but instead will be attended to later as soon as you are free.
Of course, the best thing is to have undivided attention between yourself and the child you are interacting with. This will spark meaningful conversations and foster relationships between you and the child you are interacting with since this will effectively ensure that you will fully meet your child’s needs.
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