How Lesley Took Her Existing Skills as an Educator, and Started Serving Infant/Toddler Families in a Holistic, Meaningful Way

She envisioned more for herself – beyond the classroom Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing a lot with you about the value and benefits of leading caregiver / baby “mommy & me” style family enrichment classes or workshops. As educators or therapists who serve infant and toddler families or who have an educational or professional background in a field related to early child development, we know that our job is much more than simply helping babies and toddlers develop new skills. We know the exponential impact we can make when we serve families holistically in our own communities. If you haven’t yet downloaded my free Caregiver/Baby Classes roadmap, I invite you to do so today at learnwithless.com/facilitator. Today, I want to share the story of someone I’ve come to know over the last few months. I first met Lesley in February of this year (2020), just about 6 months ago. Lesley has a B.A. and M.A. in Human Development with an emphasis in Leadership and Education. She has been working in infant and toddler classrooms for over 10 years in a variety of settings, and most recently in her own family child care program for birth to three year olds in San Jose, CA. Lesley had been following “Learn with Less” on the podcast and on Facebook, and regularly used my information to share with the parents of the children in her care. She had been daydreaming about expanding her reach to other parents. So many moms, fathers, grandparents, friends, etc have been following her facebook page and instagram account where she documents the learning happening in her childcare program with simple materials, and she was getting a lot of positive feedback and questions. She started to feel that parents in her community were craving this type of information. She envisioned more for her own program. She wanted to be able to create a support system for families, serving them (eventually) with enrichment services from the prenatal period through toddlerhood. So finding a new way to offer informational and supportive enriching experiences for the whole family felt like a natural next step for her. Here’s how she describes it: Lesley: And so I think this was the next step for me because it uses the skills I’ve been developing, and under a philosophy that I really appreciate, you know, these loose parts and recycled materials. That’s been part of my classroom since I first opened the door. And for the past two years, I was kind of researching different parent/caregiver baby classes, and, you know, there’s baby sign language, infant massage, all the different approaches and they all, they all sounded great and I still would love to be all of them, but yours spoke to me the most because it is just use what you have and you can enhance your child’s experience and their learning and their, your attachment just by being yourself and using things that you have. That’s so important to me because I, I just, I feel I always did not really appreciate all the marketing tactics that all you see in the baby industry that lead with, say, fear. And I didn’t really understand it until I was pregnant too, because even though I had this philosophy ingrained in me where I just want to use everyday materials, loose parts, I felt, “oh, well, I need to get this, and I need to get that,” even with my prior knowledge, I still felt all this pressure. So I was thinking, and having conversations with my friends and hearing how much bigger their fear was, and I found that yeah, this is really important to talk about. There’s gotta be a way…