A child’s temperament is rarely revealed gradually: it is manifested right from birth and shapes the child’s tolerance for noise, unfamiliar people, change, and physical contact. Early childhood education has come a long way toward recognizing this, but the classroom is not always the best place to address the varied needs of different children. Local communities, if engaged in a purposeful and sophisticated manner, can offer a powerful source of support.
The spectrum of temperament in early childhood settings
The ground-breaking work on temperament performed by psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess and further explored within the early childhood education (ECE) sphere has resulted in defining three basic temperament categories. These are easy, difficult/highly active, and slow to warm up. The approximate distribution across the categories is as follows: 40% easiest, 10% difficult or highly active, 15% slow to warm up, with the remaining 35% exhibiting a mixture of traits in insufficient numbers to fall under any of the categories.
What this means in practice is that in any given childcare classroom most mornings, there will be children who crave physical excitement and stimulation and those who are objectively likely to be overwhelmed by such an environment. There will be children who will want to interact with new people in the room from the first minute and those who will need a couple of weeks of sustained gentle encouragement before engaging in any social interaction outside their bubble. A six-hour daycare program, five days a week, may not meet all of these children’s needs, not because their educators do not try hard enough but because an enclosed four-wall environment cannot address their needs effectively.
Temperament is a given; it cannot simply be changed or engineered. A child with sensory processing sensitivity is not like this because their parent failed in some capacity; an intensely active child is not like this because they were not physically disciplined enough from a young age. These are manifestations of a child’s neurology, and the kids who exhibit such tendencies will either thrive in an understanding environment or be significantly hurt by a non-adaptive one.
Goodness of fit: a fit with temperament
The goodness of fit concept behind ECE temperament research and practice, when leveraged in a community-centered capacity, becomes an invaluable tool. It allows teachers to seek out specific community settings according to the needs of their students more effectively. As a result, a much broader continuum of options becomes available, all of which would be unavailable in a single childcare institution.
For instance, the local library offers a calm, low-stimulation environment, which neither a classroom, nor any other institution can provide. This is precisely the environment needed by a sensitive child with sensory processing sensitivity to feel at home. It also serves such a child by providing the opportunity to be the “new kid” in a novel place, where socialization opportunities are built directly into the experience.
In turn, the local park or community garden presents almost zero social demands, at least outside the expectations of courtesy and care for nature that many kids instinctively possess. This environment can also suit a socially engaged child, one who needs social interaction to feel connected. Such a child will be enormously benefited by the opportunities for engagement that the outside world affords, including the chance to explore and experience the domain that a child of an easy temperament would never miss.
The difference the community can make for kids who struggle being around new people
Children who struggle to be around new people often feel misunderstood, and their ECE educators may not always realize that such a child’s hesitation and fear has nothing to do with their social skills, self-confidence, or even developmental delays. On the contrary, such a child simply needs more time to warm up to a stranger.
This is where familiar community figures can be extraordinarily helpful. A local shopkeeper who can visit the center twice a month, a librarian who knows the children and is familiar with their temperaments, and an elderly neighbor who comes to the park as part of an intergenerational program to sit and talk about their life and hobbies can serve as excellent scaffolds for slow-to-warm-up children. They allow these kids to experience regular social engagement without the unpredictability that first-time meetings with strangers can bring.
The process of becoming accustomed to social interaction thus becomes the process of co-regulation, wherein the regulating role is played by an understanding adult who is familiar to the child. As the child learns to tolerate the unfamiliar, the need for such regulation decreases, and the child can eventually learn to regulate themselves. Such a development, where a hesitant child learns to approach a local library or community center figure with a wave of the hand, is impossible within the walls of a childcare institution. It can only happen in the community.
Why Bronfenbrenner’s framework suggests looking beyond the center
The work of Urie Bronfenbrenner and his Ecological Systems Theory (EST) is particularly pertinent to the discussion of the role of the community in early childhood development. EST postulates that a child’s immediate environment (the microsystem) is never an island, with its effects being directly determined by the larger systems to which it belongs. For instance, when a childcare center engages with the local community, it immediately influences the children who attend it.
Thus, a program that seeks to rely only on internal resources fails to account for the developmental role played by other microsystems, most prominently the family. This is why programs designed around the EST framework, such as the Reggio Emilia approach, suggest thinking of the environment as the third teacher. The community and the relationships that childhood education professionals and children build within it play an integral role in a child’s development. They influence and enrich the childcare center microsystem, transforming it and shaping the child in turn.
High-quality ECE programs that consider themselves innovative and comprehensive always seek to involve the local community in the child’s development. They design their curriculum around it, using community resources and opportunities as a scaffold for children’s learning. Childcare Henderson is an example of an organization that follows such principles and whose staff understands the importance of involving the local community in its operations. Neighborhood excursions become a vital element of the program, with community experiences thought through as tools to engage different temperaments.
Some practical suggestions for scaffolding with the community
The reality is that engaging with the community is not always straightforward, and its effects are not uniformly positive for all children. However, educators can prepare individual children for specific experiences in advance, making these experiences maximally beneficial for them.
The easiest way to address the needs of highly active kids is to leverage their activity level by assigning them roles that capitalize on it. This will allow such children to engage fully in the experience without suppressing their energy or affecting their sense of self-worth. For instance, an active child will not necessarily enjoy a community venue if their role within it is to sit and watch. However, putting them in charge of logistics or equipment as the “route leader” allows them to engage fully in the experience while using their physical activity in a productive manner.
Children with sensory processing sensitivity, or slow-to-warm-up temperaments, benefit immensely from what can be called “quiet observation zones,” or places within a venue that allow them to observe others without participating actively. The ability to watch from a safe distance is frequently enough for such children to feel comfortable engaging in a new environment. If given the option to save their energy, kids of these temperaments will almost always take it.
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development concept is essential for understanding how kids benefit from community excursions because they allow scaffolding to occur. This concept refers to the difference between what a child is capable of doing alone and what they are able to achieve with the help of an adult. A venue experience, when thought through carefully, will put a child in their ZPD: active children will be asked to perform social or logistical tasks that they would not have been able to handle independently. Kids with sensory processing sensitivity will be able to observe interactions that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. The venue serves as a context for scaffolding. Educators provide the scaffold in the form of guidance and support. Children incorporate the new experience, and their development proceeds.
Previews of the venue experience can be valuable, especially for slow-to-warm-up children. Visual previews of a venue or a description of the adults they will meet there can assist such children in preparing for the upcoming event.
The value of community integration for families and the neighborhood
Community-integrated ECE programs benefit not only the children who attend them but also the families and neighbors who are part of the experience. Parents witness their children growing and developing in ways they were not aware was possible. As a result, early childhood education becomes demystified as a separate endeavor, with the ECE center being no longer separated from the wider community. The value of such programs can be enormous for families who only recently arrived in the area or who previously did not feel particularly connected to the neighborhood.
Furthermore, such ECE programs also enhance the sense of belonging in the community. Parents begin to feel that early childhood education is part of what makes the neighborhood special. Figures from the community who engage with children become advocates for the local ECE programs, continuing to care for future groups of children after the current group graduates.
The community as curriculum
The argument in favor of engaging the community in early childhood education is not one of necessity. Childcare institutions are not required to involve the local environment in their operations: they have other resources at their disposal. However, such institutions stand to gain enormously from utilizing the community as a learning resource. It is relatively simple to implement, rarely requires special equipment or programming, and offers tremendous benefits for children. This is because a child’s temperament rarely changes dramatically over time. An individual child’s needs can usually be predicted with a reasonable level of accuracy. The local community can almost always offer opportunities for fulfilling these needs better than a childcare center, and the relationships that children build there become essential for their development. These are the empirical realities behind the theoretical frameworks mentioned above.
