ABSTRACT
Being ‘good’ is a slippery term.We hear babies being described as ‘good’ when they sleep all the time and ‘difficult’ when they are crying with colic. What we are really referring to is how easy their behaviour is for their caregivers. The curious one-year-old who wants to push buttons, pull earrings and throw things on the floor to see what happens can be regarded as ‘bright and lively’ by one mother but as ‘demanding’ or ‘naughty’ by another. By the time these children enter early years settings much of their understanding of what is right and wrong will have been established by how significant caregivers have responded to them.Where one child has experienced toleration of testing out without many boundaries and another has had a parent with no patience at all then each has different things to learn in the early years setting: the first that other people matter and the second that he does.
