Trauma-Informed Practice in Infant and Toddler Care: A Workshop for Educators

Duration: 3 hours

Trauma-informed practice in infant and toddler care is a philosophical stance and a daily craft. It changes what educators think teaching is: instead of managing behaviors to secure short-term order, they construct conditions that restore safety, reweave relationships, and cultivate regulation so that curiosity and learning can breathe again.

This stance rests on Howard Bath’s three pillars—safety, relationships, and regulation—understood not as a staircase but as a braid. It is clarified by Bruce Perry’s neurosequential model, which insists that distressed brains must be met from the bottom up with rhythm and repetition before reasoning is possible; it is substantiated by Jack Shonkoff and Andrew Garner’s science showing how predictable, responsive adults buffer toxic stress and literally protect neural architecture; it is animated by Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, where a calm adult nervous system lends organization to a child’s turbulence and where naming feelings knits sensation to meaning; it is grounded by Bessel van der Kolk’s reminder that trauma is recorded in the body, so healing must enlist movement, rhythm, breath, and sensory safety; it is guided by Mary Ainsworth’s attachment blueprint for secure base and safe haven; it is extended by Robert Pianta’s evidence that teacher–child relationships are protective factors within classrooms; and it is humanized by Larry Brendtro and Nicholas Long’s ethic that resilience grows in climates of dignity and strength orientation. Woven through all of this are the British Columbia Early Learning Framework and the Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Framework, which insist that well-being, belonging, and identities are not extras but the curriculum itself, and that healing is relational, cultural, and land-based.