Rachel Gillen's Blog

When I think of child development, I think of how important a healthy environment and influences are on a child's overall development. To ensure that a child develops normally, we need to avoid things like neglect, abuse, trauma (consistent and pervasive) to allow a child to avoid affects later on in life. As I work with children every day who have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect and I have also worked with children who have had atypical experiences growing up, I can compare and contrast. This is a video we show all staff at my agency as it gives a clear pictures of the affects of early childhood trauma on adults.

This has always been a challenging topic for me as I come from a family who are all public school teachers. Over the past decade, we have seen a huge increase in testing and pressure on teachers to have all their children be successful in testing. I am a result of testing as I started testing in 3rd grade and had to do it every year after that. One of the main reasons I picked early childhood was the lack of standardized testing required by the government. The program I come from assess' children on where they are developmentally but not on intelligence. I think the only testing children should ever have to go through is purely tests to see how a child learns best. Our education systems needs to move to meeting children where they are in the world of learning. We wonder why a child is struggling in school, I am a big believer in it's not a disability or a lack of motivation, it's the fact that we aren't teaching to them with the method that they learn from best. I thi