Training and education are the keys to better childcare in Iowa.

That was the message Beth Walling, state coordinator of the Iowa Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers, had Feb. 20 when she spoke at a Status of Women in Iowa commission meeting.

The Iowa Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers was implemented in January 2001 to help people become certified and to train caregivers who take care of infants and toddlers, she said.

“We are requiring our trainers to be certified,” Walling said.

Iowa adopted a plan used in California called WestEd. The program used a multimedia approach to training called the Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers. The program’s annual report said its goal is to help caregivers provide tender care and assist in an infant’s development through paying attention to his or her cues.

At the end of the training, which goes through four modules and takes about 40 hours, the participants write a 14-page paper and send it to WestEd to be reviewed. Once the paper is deemed adequate, the trainer is certified to provide childcare.

“In the first two modules, Iowa had a 93 percent certification rate,” Walling said. “That is a very high success rate compared to other states.”

Susan Hegland, ISU associate professor of human development and family studies, went through the training herself and was certified as a trainer. She now incorporates some of the training material into her HDFS 340 class of assessment and curricula in children who are newborns to 2 years.

Hegland said the HDFS courses offered to ISU students previously focused generally on all ages of children, instead of focusing on the needs of different age groups.

“An amazing amount of students use the training they’ve received from their classes with older children and try to implement that with infants and toddlers,” Hegland said. “This doesn’t work. With licensing standards, we felt we needed to have a separate course.”

She said Iowa State was one of the only institutions in the state to offer curriculum focused specifically on infants and toddlers.

“The curriculum helps the students implement research and the theories they learn,” Hegland said.

Hegland said she requires her students to attend three hours a week of class and to log in three hours working with children in Ames. By having the students working with real children, Hegland said she is emphasizing the principles of the Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers. These principles include being respectful, responsive and reciprocal caregivers to both the children and their parent, she said.

In a study conducted by Hegland and her colleagues, she said they found Iowa’s childcare centers are considerably worse than the other three states studied.

The Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers program could help Iowa’s caregivers, Hegland said. However, Hegland said she isn’t overly optimistic about the benefits since Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers requires lots of hours on a caregiver’s own time and there is inadequate regulation by the state of Iowa.

“[The Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers] needs to be combined with regulation and followed-up by visits to make sure [caregivers are] implementing the training,” Hegland said.