At Wild Hearts, we like to use the image of a tree's rings to think about how a child develops throughout childhood and how to best support them at each stage. The centre, the youngest part of the tree, is the child in infancy (0-6 months) - at this stage, infants are completely dependent on their primary caregiver(s) and they tend to prefer familiar attachment figures for comfort. During this time, childcare looks more like holistic family support to establish feeding, sleep

From isolated pandemic parenting to connected community childcare