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Hanna Perkins Mother-Toddler Program
Areas of opportunity for developmentally significant learning and mastery: I. Bodily Self-Care: Helping the toddler know needs, develop skills, and become increasingly able to take care of them independently. This is the major focus of time and activity in the mother-toddler program and is viewed as central to the experience rather than incidental. The teachers notice and value every step the toddler takes, and they encourage the mothers to do the same. They do not help the child themselves but instead support the mother in her task of handing over to her toddler the pleasure and pride that comes with learning to care for oneself. Interferences are identified but exploration and interpretation are taken up privately in separate treatment-via-the-parent sessions with the child analyst working with the family. A. Dressing and undressing: Providing opportunities for practice such as hanging up clothes in the toddler’s own cubby, dressing felt board figures in clothes suitable for the day’s weather, dressing dolls in the house corner, songs about getting dressed, etc. B. Eating: Snack time encouraging self-feeding, serving self from toddler-sized pitchers and baskets, learning new skills such as spreading, eating teacher-prepared and child-prepared items, eating foods children have grown (scallions, peas) or will plant (tops of carrots, seeds of oranges), snack cart duty, setting table by placing napkin in napkin ring child has made himself, “rules” (remain seated at table until finished, choose amount based on hunger/thirst but only take two food items at a time, ask for and pass food and drink). C. Toileting: Each child is left to gauge his own body signals and attend to them in his own time. Manifestations of anal/urethral concerns are recognized in various forms, e.g. in how messy media or gardening activities are used or avoided, in spills at snack, in attitudes to clean up time, in dawdling, teasing, refusals to cooperate, as well as in direct relation to eliminating. The teachers may point these things out to the mother and toddler together or to the mother for her to discuss privately with the toddler. Reactions to messiness are valued and supported, pride in success in steps toward toilet mastery are acknowledged. D. Washing oneself: Cleaning one’s own place at the snack table and hand-washing in the mother-toddler setting are achievements that often lead to steps toward bathing, brushing teeth, and falling asleep independently at home. E. Keeping safe: The cardinal rule of the mother-toddler program, that everyone and every thing must be safe, is presented as a way to be kind – to oneself and others – rather than as an ultimatum from without. Safety extends to feeling safe internally by regulating the level of excitement/aggression in play. Reactions against an impulse to be mean or unkind are supported. II. Development of Inner Controls: Helping mothers recognize that 1) toddler struggles are not just contrariness but represent the child’s intense wish to do things for himself or herself; 2) toddlers easily feel anger, frustration, and a sense of inadequacy and shame related to envy of the power/competence of significant others; 3) ambivalence and mutually exclusive aims (holding on vs. letting go of bodily products, clinging and dependence vs. autonomy and independence in relations with others, especially those most loved) are the minute-by-minute conflicts of toddler hood. A. Facilitating Mastery: Simple, clear, and consistent rules are based on protecting individual well-being. Activities are adapted to the toddlers’ limited level of tolerance for stimulation and frustration. Realities, even unpleasant ones, are observed and acknowledged. B. Feelings and Impulses: Help with recognizing feelings, knowing and naming them, differentiating among them, relating them to appropriate context, containing them, expressing them in words rather than bodily or through behavior, using them to decide on appropriate relieving action. Defensive use of feelings is identified, e.g. anger when feeling scared or inadequate; clinging or hugging when angry. The teachers support more mature satisfactions, substitute activities, and reactions against being unkind, messy, or showing off. Conflicts over aggressive or overly excited impulses that are specific to an individual toddler are dealt with in the treatment-via-the-parent but the concept of using loving feelings to help tame anger and valuing kindness are supported in the group setting. Bodily exploration and self-stimulation or comforting are redirected with modesty and privacy encouraged. III. The Teacher-Child Relationship: The teachers distinguish between home and school and between mother and teacher. The toddler’s conflicts over loyalty are acknowledged. As time passes, the toddler becomes more able to use a teacher as another adult from whom to learn. A. The teacher’s relationship with mothers: Support for her mothering, to help and appreciate her ability to understand and feel with her child. B. The teacher’s relationship with fathers: Recognition of the importance of his support for his wife and child, and of the value of his separate and different relationship with the toddler. C. The teacher’s relationship with other caregivers: Support for others who serve in the capacity of primary caregivers in the same ways as described above IV. Introducing the Enjoyment and Mastery of Skills and Activities: The teachers gauge the readiness of the group and individual toddlers in their choice of materials. They recognize that it is often not only the intrinsic appeal of the toy itself, but sharing a loved adult’s pleasure in using it, which fosters the toddler’s interest. A. Selection and use of toys: Versatility and opportunities for creativity are preferred. The teachers value and invest the toddler’s growing capacity for symbolic play. Interferences in play are noted but not interpreted in the group. B. Activities, skills, and interests: The teachers plan for progression with mastery, choosing activities that support both skills and creative use of materials. Projects generally involve making things the toddler can actually use, not just display. Activities are experience-near and immediate for the toddler’s world. There is an effort to integrate one area of learning with another - e.g. when children begin to wear mittens in winter there are circle-time songs and mittens for the felt-board figures; a craft might be tracing hands then making and decorating paper mittens. The overarching principle is that what the teacher brings is her investment in learning, working, thinking, observing, creating, understanding, mastering. She conveys her attitude that there is pleasure to be had in both the process and the achievement, that there is pleasure in effort, and that such pleasure builds self-esteem. V. Getting in tune: This is the most important goal in the Hanna Perkins mother-toddler group, implicit in every aspect of the program. Assisting families in this area depends on maintaining a milieu of true respect for and empathy with the mother, father, child and all their relationships. The professionals’ pleasure and satisfaction comes from supporting their efforts. “In practice this means that we do need to recognize fully, in parent as in child, their short-comings and difficulties, but focus on their strengths, appreciate their struggles to do well, and sympathize with the hardships this involves for them. When a mother lets her child wander off or a father fails to schedule a visit, they may do so because of various pathologies and interferences in their parenting, but first and foremost it means that they don’t know how important they are to their child. When a child rages at his mother and refuses to do her bidding, he may likewise manifest all kinds of problems, but first and foremost, he and mother must not forget that he also loves and needs her and is frightened by the intensity of his anger. When a mother or father sense that we understand their feelings, we can help them understand the child’s. Being a parent is as difficult as being a helpless toddler, in its own way. When this is acknowledged, along with the desperate wish of each to be felt with and helped to master, they can begin to feel for each other and to use the positives in themselves and in each other. A hard day deserves sympathy for mother and child, needs to be viewed as a challenge to figure out what went wrong and why, merits trusting assurance that things will work out better, but above all it is just a hard day. . . Many a time, parents need help to recognize their child’s impulses, their anger, greed, excitement, wish to mess, but most often they need help in appreciating the child’s self: its anxieties, its vulnerability, its defenses . . . Getting in tune is an ongoing process. It suffers inevitable periodic setbacks, progresses more in some areas than in others and is, no doubt, never achieved to perfection.” Erna Furman (1993) Toddlers and Their Mothers: Abridged Version for Parents and Educators (pp. 41 - 42). TODDLER PROGRAM DAILY SCHEDULE 9:30 - 9:55 Greeting children and parents. Place coats, etc. in respective cubby with name and color. Free play; small muscle activities, puzzles, peg board, blocks with accessories and kitchen/doll corner. Special projects. 9:55 - 10:00 Inform children, almost time for clean-up, finish what they are doing. 10:00 - 10:15 Clean up song, "Everybody Clean Up." Wash hands. Snack time. 10:15 - 10:30 Story-time; finger play and song. Picture story book and conversation. 10:30 - 10:50 Outside time. Dress for outdoor play, wait by door. Once outside, large muscle play, trikes, wagon, teeter, etc. Sand box. 10:50 - 10:55 Tell children it is almost time to go home. Finish their play. 10:55 - 11:00 Put toys and equipment away, dismissal. Goodbye Song. "Let's say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Let's say goodbye all together. Let's say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Let's say goodbye to each other."
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Goal:
The overarching goal of the Hanna Perkins
Mother-Toddler Program is to support the
growth of each child and parent through the
developmental tasks of the toddler phase.
An overview and description of the program
follows: