The aim of supporting a happy and healthy childhood is that children emerge able to face the teenage years and become confident and competent adults.
As a nanny you make a vital contribution to raising the next generation, in partnership with children's parents. If you stay with a family through many years you will see significant changes as very young children become appropriately independent. But nannies who stay for only a short time still have an important role in guiding young children towards self-reliance in their daily life.
Competent children
Child development books can be a helpful guide to the ages at which young children will probably be able to feed and dress themselves or manage with little or no help in the bathroom. Certainly, many three- and four-year-olds can be very competent in handling their own basic physical needs. They can be active helpers within the regular routines of their day with you, or in their nursery. They may have developed habits of hygiene, to which they later add an understanding of why it is important to wash their hands. Young children are capable of making their own choices and decisions, in their home, out in the garden and in places that you, of course, first check for safety.
But all examples given are about potential development. Young children do not gain a specific skill just because they have passed a particular birthday milestone. They learn because you have encouraged them to try, allowed enough time and repetition for them to practise, admired their efforts and helped mop up their disasters. In the years of early childhood they build firm foundations in physical skills, understanding the sequences of care routines like dressing and healthy habits relating to the toilet.
As children head towards middle childhood and onwards, with your support they learn the basics of personal and road safety that will enable more independent movement.
Give them time
Two- and three-year-olds can be age-competent in some dressing and undressing. But they will not able to practise these skills if their nanny insists on taking over because 'it's quicker if I do it'. Toddlers acquire skills when you agree to their wish to try to pull down a jam-covered or wet pair of trousers, as well as have a go at pulling up the dry clothes afterwards. Personal care routines may be less swift or efficient when young children take a hands-on role, but the longer-term consequences matter too. When toddlers are welcomed as partners who share in their own care, they are more likely to grow into people who are willing to persevere at the tougher tasks of self-reliance and take responsibility for other aspects of their daily lives.
When you care for babies, of course, you need to do all their personal care and ensure safe standards of hygiene. However, wise nannies notice the clear wish to 'do it myself' from a very young age. Baby George may definitely want to place his hand on the bottle and later insist on having his own spoon, although he cannot yet get much food on to it. If George's nanny is anxious to run toddler mealtimes efficiently and with minimal mess, she may curb George's enthusiasm. But she will regret the decision later when she is faced with a three-year-old who simply opens his mouth like a baby bird and has no interest in cutting his own food or pouring his own drink.
Young children can be competent helpers in a wide range of simple domestic tasks: laying the table and helping with food preparation, tidying up and simple cleaning and gardening. But they will get disheartened if their efforts seem to be failing someone else's tough standards. It does not need to be actual words like 'it's better if I do it'; adult body language alone can wipe the smile off a child's face. For instance, if you suddenly realise why a five- or six-year-old is so uneasy about trying simple skills you would normally offer to a three- or four-year-old, perhaps you need to talk privately with his parents . He has most likely had too many experiences when his carefully-spread Marmite sandwich was redone by his mother because it was 'messy', and his pride in 'doing the washing up' was not enough to excuse the water on the floor.
STEP BY STEP
The skills of self-reliance take time to learn, so young children need supportive adults who are patient and willing to explain more than once how to do something that seems obvious to an adult. As a nanny you need to work in partnership with the family as you find ways to manage the continuing shift from taking full adult responsibility for tasks, to enabling children to move towards independence. It can help to see this experience as a continuum. For example:
* There will be some tasks for which you take full responsibility. However much three-year-old Chloe wants to change baby Jake's nappy, you would not hand over this task. But Chloe can keep you company, maybe sing to Jake and hand you items you need.
* Chloe is keen on cooking and, with your guidance, is safe to tackle most of the steps in making her favourite chocolate brownies. Chloe understands that you will put the brownies in and out of the oven, and she reminds you to be careful and use the oven gloves.
* Chloe organises herself in accessing all her play resources, for herself and when she has friends round to play. She asks for help when necessary - for instance, she cannot reach the playdough that is kept in the fridge.
You can use your adult thinking skills to work out how to break down a task into smaller steps or make the same task less of a challenge. For example, pouring drinks is easier if children have just a small jug. Using a soap dispenser may be easier for young children than trying to work up a lather with a bar of soap. You can also share useful techniques with children, such as lining up the buttons at the top or bottom of a cardigan, rather than trying to start in the middle.
Find ways for children to work on their skills without any sense of pressure. They may be pleased to practise doing up their shoes at times when you do not have to be out of the door in a few minutes. Or you can create a fastenings book for them to practise getting their fingers around buttons and button holes or laces.
Finally, the patient nanny will remember that there is a difference between being able to do something, and wanting to do it now. On some occasions, skilled young children want you to cut up their chicken or finish off the tidying-up task. So long as you are not falling into the 'do it quickly' or 'not good enough' traps, then you can offer this care from time to time. As fully competent adults we, too, appreciate it when somebody else makes us a cup of tea, although we could perfectly well do it for ourselves.
CASE STUDY
Amy has inherited an over-full schedule from the previous nanny and has found herself trying to hurry up the children, against her better judgement. After two weeks in the job, Amy is ready to reflect on why speed is not necessarily an advantage.
Currently, three-year-old Sophie really wants to struggle with the buttons on her cardigan. It strikes Amy that if she keeps taking over, 'because it is quicker', in the end Sophie may not bother. Her older sister Helen experienced this pattern and is now distressed because she cannot cope with her clothes in school and there is rarely a spare adult to help her.
Sophie likes to do a very thorough job in wiping the table after lunch and becomes distressed when Amy rushes her, in order to get out to one of Sophie's many special classes. What should be an opportunity to admire the young girl's skills becomes an argument, when Sophie flatly refuses to stop wiping. Amy decides to talk with the girls' parents about calming down the days to create more time for personal routines.
With more time at their disposal, it becomes easier for Amy to manage time with Sophie. The three-year-old is now more tolerant when Amy says that Sophie has done a grand job with her coat, but would she now please let Amy do her shoes? Otherwise they will be late in picking up Helen at school and her sister will be upset.
