A few months after my daughter began preschool, I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, with my heart pounding. You see I woke up because I was having a nightmare.  I dreamt that my daughter’s caregiver was in my house, prowling through my cabinets and drawers, looking in my closets. She was in my kitchen pulling out a cups and saucers, making herself a cup of coffee – in MY kitchen.  I felt vulnerable and exposed like she was all up in my stuff. Even when I woke, I knew what this was all about.

None of us needs a PhD in psychology to know what her dream meant.  “All up in my stuff” is the exact feeling that many parents feel when their child becomes attached to her caregiver and it feels like the caregiver is moving in, making herself at home, making a cup of coffee, shuffling through the cabinets, and just getting too close.

This feeling is unnerving and scary and adds to the ambiguity many parents feel when their child moves further afield than the front door. This is all a part of the parental process of letting go.  Scary as it is, it is so good for children to develop healthy and attached relationships with other people.

Even if the rational self understands this, the unconscious, sleeping self, tells a different story.

Now we know that practically speaking, this isn’t always the case.  Often, providers come and go (less so at Home-Based Child Care – Yeah!!!!) or children are expected to transition from room to room when they reach certain milestones, i.e., walking requires a move into a toddler room.

The “continuity of care” I want to talk about here, is the kind of seamless care we can encourage between home and care outside of the home.  Very young children are capable of forming secondary attachments. This happened historically with close family members such as grandparents or aunts and uncles when extended families shared living arrangements.  These attachments provided a foundation for the establishment of trusting and caring relationships outside of the home later when the child went off to school.

Nowadays infants as young as 12 weeks are often in care outside of the home. Naturally, their secondary attachments are often with their child care provider.  This is a very important part of the child’s early development as they offer emotional continuity and provide the same foundation for the development of healthy relationships as extended family used to.

In addition to providing emotional stability for infants and toddlers, healthy relationships between parents and caregivers is also stabilizing for the children. You might think that all parents want their child to fall in love with their teacher, but some parents resent it and worry that this emotional connection may take something away from them.  They may already have guilty feelings because they have to go off to work and thus leave their children at child care.  They may worry that the provider is “better” at caring for their child than they are.  Parents are equally conflicted when their child doesn’t want to go to child care (What is wrong?  Why doesn’t she like it? What don’t I know?) as when they can’t wait to get there (My child seems to prefer her house to ours. What is so great about her?  Why is my child so excited about getting away from me?). You may even find parents reluctantly dropping their child off, coming late, or skipping days because they feel threatened by this emotional tie to someone outside of the family.

The job of allaying those fears lies with you, the child care provider.  You are  the expert about development and you are less emotionally tied to the situation. You can always explain that when given a choice, infants and toddlers will usually choose their primary caregivers (often, the parents) over their secondary caregivers and that regardless of how connected they become to their provider, it does not take away from the parent-child relationship.  The continuity of loving adult-child relationships is an ideal we are striving for.  Children should feel loved by the adults in their lives and in turn love them back.  This is good.

We make room in our hearts for more love- we don’t split a finite amount of love between people.  Our love grows, it doesn’t diminish.

Andrew Solomon, in the epilogue to Far From the Tree says, “I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones….love is a magnifying phenomenon…that every increase in love strengthens all the other love in the world.”

The earliest sets of predictable patterns are elicited by the infant herself. When she cries, her adults respond.  When she is pushed in the stroller, people stop and coo at her.  In short order she discovers that her behaviors “cause” the reactions around her and learns to repeat her behavior so she can continue to prompt the desired responses.  This “cause and effect” reaction is her first experience of “predictable sequencing” and lays the foundation for math concepts rooted in relationships.

You can well imagine how a disturbance in these predictable patterns and sequences can be problematic for the infant.  That is why both consistency of care and continuity of care are necessary and ideal for her.  Her learning is dependent on repeated experiences that result in the development of neural pathways that are laid down and then deepened over time.

The infant finds comfort in routine.  She thrives when all of her needs are met in a predictable way.  She enjoys exploring new terrain while returning to the familiar.  Practice and repetition are reassuring and should be encouraged.  Just when you think you can’t play “Peek-a-Boo” for one more minute, you remember that the infant relishes this repetition and is busy building neural pathways because of it.