Can secure and trusting relationships have an impact on children’s development?
Relationships are an important aspect of anyone’s life, and they are built up with those around us whom we care about and trust. Children’s relationships start to build from birth, from skin to skin contact as a baby all the way through to building friendships with new people at school.
Secure and trusting relationships can help to promote all aspects of a children’s development. A child within a safe and caring environment will develop a healthy emotional well-being, in turn having a positive effect on other areas of their development.
Children build relationships with their primary caregivers, with family members, with other children and also practitioners and teachers they come into contact with. All of these relationships enable children to learn social and emotional skills and benefit from a positive mental state in the present, and in the future. Children’s experiences of healthy relationships when they are young, will impact upon how they build relationships in the future.
Building relationships in nursery to aid children’s development
By the time a child starts nursery, they will have developed relationships with their family members and possibly other children. Coming into a new setting however, can be a daunting and unfamiliar experience for children, where they are out of their comfort zone and away from trusted family members. The ‘key workers’ scheme carried out in early year’s provisions is a great way to help introduce children to a new setting and to new faces they will be around. The child will have an adult they can begin to trust and forge a relationship with, and a safe base to return to, should the new environment get too much for them. Key workers are not only beneficial for new starters though, children within a key group are primarily under the care of their key worker, and will have built a secure and trusting relationship with them. Children who feel secure within a setting will feel more confident to explore their surroundings, and start to build new relationships with other staff members and children.
Developing a trusting and secure relationship
Warm, trusting and secure relationships take time to develop, and the bond will grow through encounters and interactions. Children are dependent upon their caregivers for their needs, and children need to feel safe and experience positive responses in order to build trust and form these relationships. These caring relationships can be the foundations for a child developing their own sense of identity and self-esteem. Through relationships, children are able to express themselves and can also learn how to manage and cope with their feelings.
It is not only secure relationships with the child themselves that are important, of course they are paramount, but children also learn through observations. Children witnessing others within positive and happy relationships, and seeing positive responses in return, will learn from this and imitate this behaviour.
We as adults can recognise the impact a positive relationship has on our self-confidence and our willingness to explore something new, all the while knowing we have support behind us, this is the same for children! A healthy emotional state combined with a sense of identity built from relationships will encourage independence and a confidence within all aspects of children’s development and learning.
Overall, secure and trusting relationships matter as they can have a profound effect upon children’s development such as their emotional well-being. These relationships can shape the person a child will grow into, their emotional well-being in the future and future relationships they choose to create.