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‘Sharing a picture of your child's development’ (‘Pictures’)
‘Sharing a picture of your child's development’ (‘Pictures’) is a joint initiative between the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne and Dairy Australia. It provides a resource and support materials for planning and implementing a communication strategy with parents using long day care services.
The ‘Pictures’ communication framework aims to:
- create more opportunities for communication with a focus on the individual child and their development;
- identify what is important to parents about their child’s development;
- share child development information between parents and staff; and
- strengthen the parent-staff partnership.
The framework has four components:
- a communication plan for each family;
- an individual folder for each child;
- parent-staff interviews; and
- links between child care and child and family health care services.
The framework enables staff to plan opportunities to communicate about children’s health and development in more depth with parents. It encourages services to plan an approach that is sustainable in the long-term and is proactive rather than problem focused.
Each component is considered necessary to ensure that communication with parents is conducted in a systematic way that can be replicated in services across Australia. The communication plan presents the principles of partnership to parents on enrolment and sets our proformas for recording and reporting on children’s progress. Family-centred communication strategies are incorporated so that staff listen carefully to parents priorities for their child.
For this approach to work well, child care services need to be well linked to local child and family health services and be considered as part of a professional team of local services that support families. In this way, the management of parental concerns about their child’s health, development, nutrition, or behaviour has a systematic response and concerns can be dealt with at the earliest opportunity.
Responding to parental concerns about fussy eating and promoting healthy eating.
In 2002 an additional strategy, ‘Relaxed and social – a positive approach to children’s healthy eating’ was added to the ‘Pictures’ communication framework. Written by experts in child nutrition, it presents five key messages about health eating to parents, each conveyed through a parent booklet and parent-staff interviews. The content of the ‘Relaxed and Social’ strategy is based on the latest research on ways to respond to common concerns of parents along with what was considered as ‘best practice’ in healthy eating in early childhood settings.
These five messages are:
- make time to eat together
- sit and interact with your child while eating
- offer new foods regularly
- provide healthy meals and snacks with a few choices
- let your child choose what to eat and how much to eat from a healthy selection.
Website materials
The ‘Pictures’ and ‘Relaxed and Social’ resources are available to download on this site. The materials include:
- Child care staff materials
- Parent booklets
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