Guiding children’s behavior is an important part of your role as a caregiver of young children. Positive child guidance helps promote the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children across ages. This lesson will define positive guidance, describe why it is important for infants and toddlers, and detail what you can do to promote it in your program.

This lesson will help you better understand infant and toddler development with regards to providing supportive guidance and meeting children’s needs.  Typical infant and toddler behaviors can sometimes be challenging for caregivers, so it is important to understand how temperament impacts the guidance approaches or strategies you use with young children.  Ways to address challenging behaviors will also be discussed in this lesson.

Predictable schedules, responsive routines, and the physical design of the learning environment all influence the promotion of positive guidance. This lesson describes how your infant and toddler early care and learning environment can support the development of self-regulation and help prevent challenging behaviors.

This lesson describes how you can create engaging interactions and experiences that help maintain a relationship-based approach to guidance. Tailoring experiences and activities to support children’s temperaments, interacting with families, and using prevention strategies to avoid challenging behaviors will be addressed.