Chapter 7: Parent–Provider Relationships In Early Care Settings

Young children learn directly through acting on and observing their environment, but this learning requires adult mediation of children’s experiences (Odom & Wolery, 2003). For most young children, primary caregivers, including parents, are the admired persons who provide scaffolding, prompting, and other bridges to learning. In some families, however, a poor parent-child relationship may blunt the effectiveness of the parent as a model or the parent may lack the critical skills to support their child’s development, often as a result of their own difficult early histories. Programs intended to improve infant and child outcomes, therefore, often include a parent support component, achieved by a relationship with a provider. This paper will use constructs from social learning theory in tandem with concepts from the attachment literature to discuss the importance of parent-child relationships to child development and offer a perspective on the many ways in which providers from a variety of early childhood programs use relationship-based approaches to improve parent-child relationships.