The Wonderful Adventures of Childcare

For almost a year, I have been working at a daycare. I work with a large age range, from 4 months old to 7 years old. Working with young children has taught me a variety of lessons: how to communicate, how to keep them entertained, how to comfort them, and the most important lesson that I use in and out of the workplace: patience.

As their young brains are developing, it is important to take the time to teach valuable lessons. When dealing with strong emotions, I make sure to provide healthy ways to deal with them. Since they are so young and don’t know any better, it is very important to be patient and calm, otherwise, they will never learn. The more I worked in childcare, the more I learned about the importance of patience. When they’d throw a fit about not receiving a toy they wanted, or when they didn’t want to take a nap or refused to get ready to go outside, I had to learn that the only solution is to be patient with them until they are ready to listen. At first, it was hard to be patient, as for my whole life I was never really a person who liked to “waste time”. I always set a strict agenda in my head, and as soon as something goes wrong I get frustrated and want to give up. Upon working with children I had to change that mindset immediately because for them to follow a strict agenda was just simply impossible. When dealing with situations when they get really upset, sad, frustrated, stressed, overwhelmed, etc., I treated them as learning experiences and soon discovered that patience became my best tool when working in childcare.

I started applying the patience I learned in the workplace to my everyday life. Learning was like a roller coaster– I had good days and bad days. When I had moments where everything seemed to just go terribly, I took a step back and was patient with myself. Sometimes it was difficult to do so, but I learned to allow myself to calm down and become optimistic. I granted myself patience whenever I made a mistake and took the time to make that mistake right. When the issue was resolved, as I would do at my work, I treated it as a learning experience for myself. Learning something new is always going to take time, but in the end, it’s all worth it. If you don’t take the time and effort to achieve something you really want, it will never happen. Little had I known that childcare would have taught me the most important life lesson: patience. Being able to use it in and out of the workplace was hard work to achieve, but once I did I saw everything from a different perspective. I became more motivated, hopeful, and forgiving of myself. Learning patience was the best decision I could have ever made.

Image Citation:

“Children” by aka Quique is licensed under