What early childhood practitioners need to know about providing multidisciplinary support
KidSTART Singapore
Empowering families to take the first step towards providing their children with a good start in life.
Since our inception as an independent agency in 2020, KidSTART Singapore aims to organise an annual townhall for staff and partners to celebrate KidSTART’s key achievements and milestones achieved in the past year, acknowledge the contributions of our partners, and provide important updates on our next steps forward as an organisation.
This year, our Partners Townhall was held physically for the first time ever at YWCA Fort Canning on 28 September, bringing together 270 attendees comprising our staff, programme partners, social service agencies and other supporting agencies.
Themed “KidsMatter: Collab Power”, it centred around the need for collaboration with early childhood practitioners in various fields to provide multidisciplinary support for children in low-income families.
Read on to find out our top takeaways from the speakers!
1. A child’s development of cognitive skills is not a given – it must be taught
Our keynote speaker Ms Kimberly Meunier , Executive Director of the Abecedarian Education Foundation, shared about Executive Function (EF) as a critical skill for a child’s school readiness and later life success.
EF influences a range of human functions – our ability to hold information, focus, retain and use information, and set and achieve goals among many others. However, children are not born with EF skills – they need to be taught. The critical development window starts from age 0 to 6 years old, where a child’s EF and self-regulation (SR) skills can develop the most rapidly.
Source: Weintraub et al. (In Press).
Knowing this, what can we do as practitioners to develop a child’s ER/SR skills?
Children can learn them through repeated experiences and social interactions. As practitioners, our goal should be to gradually shift the child away from relying on adult regulation to mastering the skills independently.
Ms Meunier shared about the Abecedarian Approach, an effective tool used by KidSTART practitioners in stimulating the development of EF and SR skills in children from age 0 to 5, and it has shown great success.
The approach focuses on language development and high-quality adult-child interactions, and comprises of 4 tenets: Enriched Caregiving, Language Priority, Conversational Reading and LearningGames®.
For more information on the Abecedarian Approach, read more in our Instagram post:
2. Our everyday interactions with a child matter
Through their combined wealth of experience in the early childhood education sector, Ms Puspavalli Namasivayam, KidSTART Early Childhood Consultant, and Ms Rainbow Ng , KidSTART Assistant Manager in Capability Development, shared about how child development often occurs through the simplicity of everyday quality interactions.
If you’re a caregiver or educator, the day-to-day exchanges between you and a child may seem trivial, but they can have outsized impact in building a child's self-confidence, curiosity, social skills, self-control and communication skills.
When a child babbles, gestures, or cries, and we respond sensitively to their signals with eye contact, words, or a hug, the child’s brain will form neural connections and internalise this experience of warm responsive care and use it to self-regulate feelings as they grow older. Children also require opportunities to explore, learn rich language and engage with the world and people around them.
An essential guiding strategy is to practise ‘serve and return’ interactions. These are focused two-way back-and-forth engagement between an adult and child. During these interactions, children should be seen as equal partners with their own feelings, thoughts and emotions. Adults will also learn to be more conscious of their actions, slow down to notice the little things and provide genuine responses to children.
3. A child’s resilience is influenced by the resilience of a family
Resilience is the capacity to tackle obstacles and take hardship in one’s stride, and family resilience is the capacity of a family to overcome significant life challenges, stick together and emerge stronger.
In their talk on resilience and well-being, Dr Yee Keow C. , Consultant in Children’s Emergency at Khoo Teck Puat - National University Children’s Medical Institute and National University Hospital, and Dr Dr. Natasha Riard , Senior Psychologist in the KidSTART multidisciplinary team, shared about how a resilient family is often marked by a climate of mutual trust, open expression of feelings, and clear communication.
This is highly stabilising for a child, as it affects their ability to communicate and make decisions, and influences how they think and feel about their roles, identities and relationships as they grow older. As such, Family Health can be considered as an expansion of Child and Maternal Health.
As early childhood practitioners, some of our jobs may focus largely on working with children directly. However, it is equally important to do our part to strengthen family relationships and functioning, and foster positive parent-child relationships by providing holistic support to parents.
At KidSTART, we believe that every parent desires the best for their kid and each of them possesses strengths that can be harnessed for their child’s development!
4. Extended social networks help sustain healthier children
The old adage goes, “It takes a village to raise a child”, but beyond just having more helping hands, social networks with extended kin or co-residents offer greater support resources to mothers with young children and help sustain healthier children.
Ms Melanie Chan , Assistant Senior Social Worker at Care Corner Singapore and Ms Yogeswari Munisamy , Senior Principal Social Worker at MSF Child Protective Service, and doctoral candidate of National University of Singapore, shared how parents can benefit from these four forms of social support:
Children will also benefit as an extended network of support offer intimacy and support, make them feel cared for, help them deal with physical and emotional stressors, and hence play a key role in healing.
Whether you are an early childhood practitioner, an extended family member or a neighbour, you can play a key role in influencing a child’s health and well-being!
We hope that these takeaways from the townhall provide insights on how practitioners, caregivers, community partners and social support networks can work hand-in-hand to help children develop executive functions, develop healthy family functions, build up resilience and provide every child with #AGoodStart in life.
As KidSTART gears up for nationwide expansion, we’re also on the lookout for self-motivated individuals with a passion for helping children to join our team. If you’re interested, learn more about the available job positions and apply at www.mycareersfuture.gov.sg/companies/kidstart-singapore-202027544G.