Child care providers given pep talk at CSC

The 19th Excellence in Early Childhood Conference at CSC attracted child care providers from four states, some from as far away as 300 miles.

Those in attendance listened to presentations about a wide variety of health care topics, including ways to incorporate nature and sign language to their instruction and information about the societal impact of methamphetamine.

Jeff Johnson, a best-selling author who operates a child care center in Sioux City, Iowa, gave attendees tips on how to combat the “Attack of the Snoterpillars” during his keynote address Saturday morning.

He describes snoterpillars as not only the globs of green mucus that run vertically from a child’s nose, but also as the negative aspects of a child care provider’s job. He noted that 30-40 percent of child care providers leave the occupation in the first year because of stress and burnout.

“Getting in tune with children is physically, emotionally and mentally demanding,” he said. “That’s why so many of us walk around burned out, stressed out and run down.”

He listed numerous snoterpillars that can make a child care provider become disenchanted, from the disengaged dad who has a cell phone to his ear when he drops the children off in the mornings and when he picks them up eight hours later, to the elementary teacher who takes recess from one of the center’s energetic former enrollees when wrongfully diagnosing him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Despite those issues, he told those in the crowd to seek the “good stuff,” in their jobs, such as the smiles on the children’s faces and the “light bulb” moments when they learn.

“If you can have this outlook when you go into work in them morning, I guarantee life is going to be a little bit easier,” he said.

He also stressed the importance of the occupation.

“The job that you folks do is the most important job in the world,” he said. “There are presidential candidates running around talking about how they are going to fix the world for us, how they have ideas to make this a better place to live, how they have the answers. The fact of the matter is that the answers to the world’s problems, society’s problems and your corner of the world’s problems are growing up in your programs, and you have the honor of getting to guide those future world leaders and problem-solvers in their growth and development.”

He encouraged child care providers to not only provide a nice facility for children, but also to connect with them emotionally. He said their job is to “build a strong emotional bond, that leads to healthy emotional environments.

“The physical environment is very important. We need our comfy, cozy area with our books and our block area and we need our space to be loud and noisy and we need to get messy,” he said. “But, the environment we neglect is the emotional environment. We are, every day, creating an emotional environment in our programs that is much more important than our physical environment.”

Dr. Kim Madsen, a CSC family and consumer science professor who organizes the conference, said she received positive comments about Johnson’s presentations and the quality of the event’s speakers across the board.

“We have developed a good reputation for the quality we present,” she said.

She said the conference is not only beneficial to the region’s child care providers, but also gives CSC students a chance to become involved in a professional development activity.

Next year’s Excellence in Early Childhood Conference will be Feb. 20-21, 2008.