The personal characteristics of the person or people you are leaving your child with are important to consider when making your choice.
Are you returning to work? Are you looking to leave your child with a nanny, home-educator or at an early childhood service? You may not want to leave your baby or young child with someone who you don’t know – a stranger. But you can develop a sense for who is more likely to be a good person to leave your child with and who is not.
Personal Characteristics
The best person to leave your child with for childcare is a person who genuinely likes children. In particular the person must like your child. This includes calling your child by their correct name, not mispronouncing your child’s name and always showing an interest in your child.
Such a person has a natural affinity with young children. What makes a person more likely to have this characteristic?
- being born into a large family lots of siblings
- someone with their own children (although note that not every person, parents included, naturally like children, especially other people’s children)
- a person who has done a lot of volunteer work or babysitting of other people’s children so that they have gained experience and may have also developed a true liking for children before deciding that their vocation will be working with children
You will see the person always noticing young children in their presence and paying as much or more attention to children than to adults.
Further personal characteristics that a person needs to care well for a child include:
- being healthy, getting enough sleep to maintain energy levels during the day, being willing and able to play with children and lift and carry them, and an ability to look after their own emotional and physical wellbeing well
- ability to ‘read’ what children are thinking – a strong intuitive sense of what different children want and are interested in
- reliability and dependability
- ability to do two or more things competently at the same time, calmly and without becoming frazzled
- honesty / truthfulness
- an attitude and response to both children and parents that their role is to serve them and they do so with respect, humility, and discretion
- intelligence to know when to speak up, when to stand back, when to help for the child’s and family’s best interests
- humour and an ability to laugh with and have fun with children at their level
Depending upon what other reasons you are leaving your child in the care of someone else for, other characteristics may come into play:
- maturity
- ability to speak a particular language
- ability to cook / clean
- drivers license holder and clean driving record
- knowledge of different preschool type activities and preschool areas of play, such as how to make playdough, how to make finger paint, how to guide a child in doing a puzzle without doing the puzzle for the child, how to set up a bowl for water play with pouring equipment, etc
- expertise or qualifications in a particular area e.g. in nursing, in music, in childcare/early childhood teaching, in art or crafts.
In early childhood centres it is also essential that the people caring for your child have skills in managing groups of children, including an ability to watch and track several children who are playing in different areas of the playroom or playground.
