NEW PARTNERSHIP BRINGS YALE ‘CHILD’ ASSESSMENT TOOL TO THE CAPITAL REGION AND LOWER HUDSON VALLEY

The Early Care & Learning Council (ECLC), in partnership with Brightside Up of the Capital Region and the Child Care Council of Westchester announce the receipt of $480,000 in funding from the Robin Hood Foundation, having been selected to pilot a new assessment tool, the CHILD/IT, in partnership with the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development & Social Policy at Yale University.

The CHILD Tool is a comprehensive assessment tool designed to examine the mental health climate of early childhood and education programs. The CHILD also uses the assessment to provide guidance for improving the mental health climate and providing children with strong social-emotional supports. The CHILD/IT is a tool designed specifically for use with infants and toddlers, especially for those in home-based childcare settings. Should the CHILD/IT project outcomes here in the Capital Region and in Westchester prove the CHILD/IT to be a useful tool, ECLC will move to incorporate its use throughout the state of New York, ultimately encouraging and leading the nation in the adoption of the tool’s use by other states.

“We envision offering equity-informed mental health consultation services in both projects, in Albany and Westchester, working mostly with providers who serve infants and toddlers from low-wage earning families,” Meredith Chimento, ECLC Executive Director states, “as these families are experiencing not only stressors associated with poverty and structural racism but also the disproportionate impact of COVID-19.”

“Delivering high-quality child care is a stressful endeavor, and those who undertake it themselves need support and guidance, often in short supply,” said Kimberly Polstein, Director of Mental Health Services at Brightside Up. “An assessment tool like the CHILD/IT will help the mental health consultants in this project to build on and deepen the providers’ capacity to provide a healthy social-emotional “climate” through intentional, compassionate, and responsive interactions and programmatic choices.”

“We also expect that our work using the CHILD/IT with providers will help them build specific skills, especially the abilities to observe children and interpret their behavior, to respond to children supportively and compassionately, to engage positively with families, and to accept and request assistance and support”, said Jami Flynn, Infant Toddler Regional Coordinator from the Child Care Council of Westchester.

“The first three years of a child’s life are the most critical for their early development, charting a pathway for the rest of their lives. Ensuring healthy mental health climates and interactions with infants and toddlers is critical to supporting positive development. As we continue to invest in early childhood programs, embedding evidence-based assessments and supports for educators that hone in on creating healthy and responsive interactions with children is a pivotal part of this work. The CHILD-IT tool, paired with mental health consultation supports for childcare providers, can offer us a 360-degree look at the social-emotional environments of these programs, thereby improving the way that we iterate, invest, and – ultimately – raise our children” stated by Robin Hood Foundation.

It is expected that this project will help providers understand that children’s behavior has meaning, that the social-emotional development of children is critical to their future mental health and wellness, and that they can assist children in their care by responding to their social-emotional needs.

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For more than forty-five years, the Early Care & Learning Council has been a leading voice for early care and education in New York State. With its statewide network of child care resource and referral agencies, the Council has successfully fought for increases in funding to support early childhood programs and for the reform of child care laws, regulations, and policies to improve safety and quality in child care settings. earlycareandlearning.org

Brightside Up is a child care resource and referral agency (CCR&R) dedicated to providing expert resources to the capital region in order to improve the availability and quality of child care and to assist families in finding child care. brightsideup.org

The Child Care Council of Westchester is a private, nonprofit resource and referral organization that champions the healthy development of children, families and communities by promoting quality early care and education. childcarewestchester.org