OUR PHILOSOPHY: DEVELOPING HUMAN POTENTIAL

Guiding Young Children, Seventh Edition, is designed for use by college students and others who are learning to interact and to communicate with young children in group settings. Our emphasis is on the process of developing human potential in all children by consciously applying principles of guidance. Those principles are teased upon child development theory and research, as well as upon our many years of experience working with young children and their families, with early childhood professionals, and with students preparing for careers with young children.

Because our emphasis is on developing human potential, we view guidance as a concept that is broader and more complex than discipline or behavior management. Guidance is more than getting children to do what we want them to do today; it is helping them to become everything they can become for all of their tomorrows. It is important that even beginning caregivers and teachers understand, or at least think about, the ways in which their interactions can have an impact on those tomorrows. Thus, in addition to offering specific, concrete suggestions for adults who might be working with young children for the first time, we try to explain the reasoning behind those suggestions, and to offer general principles that can serve as a framework to guide--not to dictate--the reader's decisions and interactions with children.

Along with the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), we believe that early childhood professionals need a firm grasp of typical patterns of development as well as a thorough knowledge of the interests,abilities, and unique characteristics of each child in their care, including as well the family and community context within which those children live and grow. We offer many suggestions for assignments in observation and application that will help the reader get to know individual children and try out, and perhaps even refine, the general guidelines discussed in this book. We recognize that our views are shaped by our own cultural and educational backgrounds, and we encourage our readers to think about the origins of their own values and beliefs as they encounter different ideas among colleagues and the families of children in their care.

As increasing numbers of young children in this country spend more and more of their early lives in group settings, we note with alarm a move toward regimented curricula and high-stakes testing of young children: We remain unwavering in our conviction that early childhood professionals must work to make children's settings resemble the supportive and enriching aspects of home and family life, rather than impersonal institutions. Rigid timetables and uniform treatment may be signs of efficiency in factories, but they run counter to the goals of high-quality child care programs, in which guidance requires taking the time to learn about each specific child in each specific situation.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

While this seventh edition of Guiding Young Children retains many useful features from earlier editions, including provocative "Talk It Over" suggestions in each chapter, it has been extensively revised and updated.

• Infants and Toddlers. We continue to incorporate information about infants and toddlers throughout the book to underscore our belief that early childhood professionals understand children better when they are able to place current development within a larger context, and when they have an idea of how far the children in their care have come and where they are likely to go next.
• The Role of Culture. In recognition of growing diversity within early childhood classrooms, we have expanded our discussion of the role of culture in every decision made by the early childhood professional. Again, rather than isolate this discussion, we have attempted to raise consciousness of the pervasive influence of culture by integrating this discussion throughout the text, with particular emphasis in Chapters 3 and 4.
• Including All Children. For the same reason, and in keeping with the spirit of inclusion, we continue to weave information about children with disabilities throughout the book, rather than including a separate chapter on mainstreaming. This decision reflects our conviction that children with disabilities are children first, and that, as all children can, their human potential can be developed through environments and interactions that are tailored to their individual needs and strengths. We recognize that there is likely to be as much difference between two children with cerebral palsy, for example, as between a child with cerebral palsy and another with Down syndrome, or between either of those children and another with no apparent disability. In other words, the basic principle of child development applies: all children are alike in some ways and very different in others; they follow a similar sequence of development, but at their own pace and in their own unique ways.
• Applying Guidance Concepts. Our aim throughout this book is not to prescribe across-the-board methods or techniques, but to encourage aspiring early childhood professionals to think about how particular guidance concepts might apply when they are working with children whose cultural background differs from their own or who have particular disabilities. We assume that students will have the opportunity to take other courses in which they will acquire more detailed knowledge about child development in general, as well as courses that will teach them about many aspects of diversity, including culture and disabilities. We hope that practicing early childhood professionals will take it upon themselves to seek more information about particular cultures or disabilities when children with those characteristics are included in their programs--just as they would try to learn about any aspect of individual development, family life that makes a child unique. We suggest several sources of such information at the end of each chapter.
• Reorganized Chapter Content. In order to accommodate new material, we have combined and shortened some chapters from the previous edition: Chapter 4, Collaborating with Families of Young Children, now includes material on welcoming new families as well as maintaining ongoing relationships with them. Chapter 5, A Strengths-Based Approach to Guidance, combines previous chapters on promoting positive self-esteem and appreciating positive behavior. Chapter 14, Evaluation and Professionalism, incorporates and makes the connection between the ideas from separate chapters that addressed those topics in the previous edition.

We have rearranged the order of the chapters so that Part I provides an overview of the principles of guidance; Part II presents a global view of strategies based on those principles--the concepts of indirect and direct guidance; Part III addresses the application of those principles in specific program areas; and Part IV places the concept of guidance within the broader perspective of professionalism and human resource development.

Although dealing with challenging behavior is the topic that students (and teachers!) often want to discuss first, we have moved that chapter to the end of Part III because we believe that, whatever the individual characteristics of the children and families they serve, early childhood professionals who conscientiously apply all the principles and strategies presented in this book will have to cope with fewer challenging behaviors in the long run. The corollary to this belief is that early childhood programs can, in fact, exacerbate challenging behaviors when they set unrealistic expectations for children's behavior and fail to use the indirect and direct guidance techniques described here.

We encourage all instructors who use Guiding Young Children to adjust this sequence of topics to suit their preferences, the needs of their students, and the constraints of their particular teaching situations. We have provided an extensive list of additional readings and videos at the end of each chapter to help instructors enrich their courses and to make it easy for students to extend their exploration of the concepts in this book.