Kathryn L.

Meet Kathryn

• Comfortable with pets

Before you begin reading about me, I invite you to take three deep breaths. I came into childcare because I loved children and felt a natural ease with them. More than a decade later I've been witness to the lives, struggles, and intimate experiences of the many families with whom I've worked. In both professional daycare and private home settings, I've watched parents navigate the building blocks of the parent-child relationship and the ripple effect today's choices can have on the foundations of life-long relationships. Over the years, my ease and confidence with children has grown. It hasn't always felt like forward momentum - there's been a lot of shedding of ideas of how children "should" be treated. I've read parenting books and increased my understanding of child development. Ultimately, though, my skill with children these days comes not from technical knowledge of developmental milestones, but from a highly practiced Read more and tuned literacy in the language of infants and toddlers. I sometimes joke that I've moved completely away from disciplining the children in my care. The true meaning of this is that I've cultivated a personal discipline which allows me to respond with compassion and empathy to whatever tools a child has at his disposal to communicate with me. I firmly believe that the key to altering any undesirable behavior pattern is understanding the developmental needs being expressed and I excel at identifying the needs a child is working to communicate. I've read that it takes 10 years to master a craft. And when I look at the depth of connections I cultivate with the children in my care today compared to when I first began babysitting, I can see that I've become a master toddler whisperer. This statement comes with great gratitude. Learning to communicate so strongly with infants and toddlers has been a call to greater understanding of respect, compassion, and empathy. The next step in my professional growth is expanding my capacity to help parents and other caregivers communicate in more rewarding ways with their children. If you are a family in transition, working through a particularly challenging behavioral issue, or simply need a little reassurance that everything really is OKAY, I would love to chat with you about how I can help your family restore balance in a time of rapid change and growth. Remember: Deep breaths. This phase will pass.

Trust & safety

Experience

References

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