Child Care Professionals: Not Just Caregivers - Memory Makers
Updated: Sep 10
In this interview, founder of Accrescent Institute, Thomas C. Rector discusses how BioSocial Cognition transforms the way early childhood educators approach their critical work.
We explore the Brain Science and You training, which moves beyond standard behavioral management to reveal the biological mechanisms of memory and trust.
This conversation empowers professionals to see their daily interactions not just as care, but as foundation for a child’s future decision-making and emotional security:
Memories are Resources: Early childhood experiences are not just history; they are the biological library a child draws upon to make every future decision.
Sensing Safety: Before a child can intellectualize, they rely on sensory input to build a foundation of trust and attachment.
The "I Can" Factor: True self-esteem is defined by the internal realization of capability, rather than external praise.
Wisdom vs. Baggage: Caregivers have the unique opportunity to help children attach positive meanings to their experiences, turning potential "baggage" into useful wisdom.
The "Why" Matters: Understanding the biology behind a child's behavior allows caregivers and parents to move beyond tactical responses to strategic, empathetic consistency.
Child Care Professionals: Not Just Caregivers - Memory Makers - Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)
Table of Contents
The Critical Role of Early Childhood Educators in Memory Formation
Shannon:
Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about BioSocial Cognition and childcare, and the ‘Brain Science and You’ childcare trainings that you have for people who are doing early childhood education, family childcare, preschool, after-school care.
Let’s start with the role of a childcare provider, the importance of the role of a childcare provider in a child’s life. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Thomas C. Rector:
One is that they have become a very integral part of raising children these days. At one time, Mom was at home. That’s very stereotypical, but that was the way it was.
Childcare has come on, and at the same time that has occurred, we have become much more knowledgeable and more aware that those formative years are huge, absolutely huge to the development of the child and the person to be.
What can we do or how can we do it, or why would we do whatever we do with regard to making those years as bountiful as possible with regard to laying the groundwork that the child’s (the future adult’s) life is going to be built upon?
It’s at the very beginning.
From the BioSocial Cognition standpoint, we are very clear that memories are being placed every moment, every day, all of the time, 24/7.
Those memories are not just history, but those memories are what are going to be drawn upon to make future decisions. Being very conscious with regard to what memories are being placed there and what those memories mean to the individual.
Childcare from infant, from one year old, from walking, or from out of diapers, whatever those stages are, those are profoundly important to the outcome of the adult because life is built upon those memories, because they will use those memories to be a resource to make decisions.
We have shown it empirically over and over that the connection that occurs from birth through the early years to one or more individuals is very important for a person to be secure and be able to build their lives upon this.
This is really our species. Humans are social beasts, we need to have that particular connection.
Early childcare is profoundly important not only in the memories part of it, but also the connection, safety, and reliability of relationships that they can build their life upon. Very important.
Establishing Trust with Young Children, Even from Birth
Shannon:
You touched a little there on attachment or bonding and how the child feels attached to an adult. There are scales of that. Can you go a little bit deeper into more on how bonding or attachment impacts the child or affects the brain?
Thomas C. Rector:
In the beginning of our existence as infants, we can only sense the world. We can’t intellectual the world, we can only sense the world.
We sense that world through touch, we sense that world through sense of smell, we sense that world through the sounds that we hear, we sense that world through our tastes.
We sense the world and we build our sense of attachment, which is really a security thing, attachment is something I can trust, and I can build my life upon trust.
That sensory input at the very beginning is profoundly important. The holding and the hugging and the cooing and the smiling, and all of the things that go with that.
The senses are important to build the component of trust in relationships. If you don’t have trust, then you feel vulnerable. If you feel vulnerable, then you’re on-guard. If you are on-guard, then you start isolating yourself.
It is profound in that this attachment occurs, and that attachment can be as rich as one person, it can be as rich as two or three people, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we get to build our life upon this thing called trust.
At that level, in our infancy, that level of trust is everything. They’re completely and absolutely vulnerable.
That trust not only is a sensory input, but that the world responds to the needs. This is not at an intellectual level, this is at a sensory level.
If I cry, my problem is solved. If I feel uncomfortable from poopy pants, my problem is solved, I’m safe, I’m secure, and it’s at a very fundamental level.
Now, as we go forward, then the childcare person comes into this mixture of people and is another person. When the childcare person is with the children many hours, maybe sometimes more hours than they are with their own parents because of working situations.
To be able to create these additional relationship memories that are “I’m safe, I can trust, that are built upon that I already know that I’m safe and trust this location and this person, now I can be with this new person that’s there”.
The role that a childcare person provides is absolutely phenomenal.
Common Goal: Raising Adults
Shannon:
As a former childcare provider myself, it’s good to hear that validation that what we do is important. The parents’ role is important, but we do supplement that. You have a Mission of Parenting, or the goal, that you also include in Brain Science and You, the training for childcare providers.
Can you expand on what that goal is and why you include a Mission of Parenting in childcare provider training?
Thomas C. Rector:
From my perspective, looking adult interface with children, every interface we have with children, we need to understand that we’re contributing to the parenting component of the child’s development.
Everything we do, how we interact, what we say, what we don’t say, how we respond, those are supplemental and additive components to the child’s development.
If we understand that, then we need to be clear about what is the goal. What is the overall goal?
The overall goal is we’re raising an adult.
There’s a phrasing in our culture that says raising a child, but we’re really raising an adult. Childhood is a phase going toward that.
Whatever we are doing are all contributing to what this adult will have to work with to be able to process their world and be successful in it. I believe, from this perspective, that we need to have a common goal, an overarching goal that is that we’re raising an adult.
What are the priorities?
The priorities are that it’s more important to feel good about yourself than it is to have material things. Material things can be fun externally, but they don’t hum from the inside.
Feeling good about yourself is where the smiles come from, that’s where the joy of living comes from, the joy of finding your way, the joy of developing your own talents and your own potential.
If we work with the same overarching goal and then we contribute our part. Not any one person contributes all of it, not even the parents. As children grow up, they’re going to have coaches and teachers, aunts and uncles, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and they’re going to have all these people in their world that are going to be contributing to it, too.
Having this common goal then sets the priorities for how all of the little things are decided, how all of the little things are implemented or not implemented, are emphasized.
Cultivating the "I Can" Mindset in Early Learners
Shannon:
You’re speaking about creating that positive self-esteem and tools to move forward, is how I understand it.
Thomas C. Rector:
Correct.
Shannon:
Everything that we are doing to support that child is contributing to how they view themselves, how they feel about themselves and their abilities, so having that positive impact versus a neutral or negative impact. They may not remember the specific instances, but they’re going to remember the feelings, the connections, the environment. Is that correct?
Thomas C. Rector:
I guess I’ll back up just a little bit here. How we feel about ourselves, our positive self-esteem is coincidentally correlated with the skills and knowledge we have, but is not a direct statement.
We can have all kinds of skills and be very good at something, and not feel positive about ourselves. We can be very comfortable with ourselves and not know how to read.
So, at times, this gets really blurred.
What is positive esteem? It isn’t something you hold in your hand and you give to somebody. It is something that they arrive at. How do they arrive at that is the key question to be answered.
Fundamentally, it means that I can. I can do this.
I can ask this person.
I can reach for this resource.
I can figure it out.
I can.
That positive esteem is what then gives them the internal resource to be able to reach out into the world and to respond in a manner that they’re comfortable with.
I can.
I can be okay with this.
I can learn to read.
I can learn to ride a bicycle.
I can learn to stand up on a stage and sing a song to the parents out there.
I can do this. That is self-realized wins, if that’s the right way of saying it.
I was able to build that LEGO thing, and it isn’t what an adult told me, it was me being able to see that.
I was able to color between the lines. It’s a self-realization, I can.
In childcare, there are hundreds, thousands of opportunities for the childcare person to create those moments where the child can say, “I can do that.” It isn’t what we tell them, it’s what they see, recognize, and know.
So, kind of dividing that out, the second part of that is the tools to reach their potential.
In this phrase, tools means memories.
Memories, whether they’re skills, or experience, or book learning, or myself reading, all of those things are tools that are then used to go for what they want to do, to reach their own potential, whatever it is.
I guess just wanting to elaborate on the question.
The Impact of Memories in Early Childhood & Child Care
Shannon:
I think that’s great. Thank you. Let’s talk a little bit about memories here and what’s inside of a memory. You talk about memories a lot. You say "We are Memory Makers" as a statement.
Can you talk about why it’s important for childcare providers to understand the concept of what’s inside of a memory and how they’re making memories?
Thomas C. Rector:
A memory is not a freestanding thing, it’s connected to other memories. A memory is a result of a thing that occurred. Something occurred, a memory is a piece of history, it has happened.
The way the brain works is it is designed to go out and look for associated information, memories, and draw that forward to help inform the decision to deal with the moment. As soon as the moment is dealt with, then there is a new memory.
That new memory is attached to the previous memories that were drawn forward.
Included in that new memory is what was the situation, what was the stimulus information that was going on, that’s the raw data that triggers, that’s the raw data we’re trying to deal with, and the old memories are attached.
We decided to take some sort of action, whatever that action was, we remember that particular action. We remember what the result was, and then we attach a meaning to it.
In a very basic fundamental way, we either attached it to be wisdom to us or we attached it to be baggage.
I say that and the visualization I have is in the airport and I’m towing baggage behind me, and it’s holding me back, slowing me down, it restricts me from going to certain places.
Whereas wisdom is something that informs me and I have an understanding, either a narrow scope understanding or a conceptual scope of understanding.
When we use analogies and we teach through analogies, analogies are something that are memories and they are wisdom, but those analogies are so many times very leverageable in a broad spectrum of situations.
Sometimes we have broad spectrum kinds of things that make sense to us. Other times, we have very explicit kinds of wisdom that are gained from that.
What’s really important to understand is that all experiences, which means all memories, have the opportunity to be wisdom or they have the opportunity to be baggage.
Our challenge, and this is especially important in the young age, is that they come away with wisdom from that movement. It doesn’t matter that it hurt.
I’ll use the stove or a fireplace or a hot thing. We all get to learn that Dad said don’t touch that because it’s hot. We eventually touch it and get burned. Now we understand what hot is.
That understanding of hot then becomes ‘ouch, that hurts,’ but let’s make it wisdom, so things that are hot, if we feel that they’re hot, then we know that we will get burned, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be afraid.
We stand in front of a heater and warm up our hands and thaw them out. We have hot water coming out of a faucet, we bring up to warm, not hot-hot.
We need to learn the wisdom of the experience.
When we’re really young, we make many mistakes, we have many different little bitty experiences, all of those are things that are built on past memories, creating new memories that are being saved and having a meaning put to them.
The child care arena has so much opportunity to make such a rich, learning, wisdom-oriented experience.
Understanding The "Why" Brings Improved Outcomes
Shannon:
Lovely. So many conversations and points in that. The young brain is growing so very much. As early childhood providers, we often have our own experiences, we have education in safety and development and in learning. How does your training supplement or add-on to the existing education that we’ve gleaned as childcare providers?
Thomas C. Rector:
A great deal of the information is provided at a much more tactical level, an explicit kind of this, this, this. What the BioSocial Cognition understanding lets us do is to be able to see those very important pieces of information, knowledge, and experiences, to be able to see them in the larger context of what is going on in the brain so that we can make sure that there’s consistency throughout all of those toward the achievement of an adult.
To a lot of degree, for many people, it answers the why.
Not the doing or what I should do, but why it does this, why is this happening? Why should I do it this way? Why did I get that reaction?
When we understand the why of it, then we can be directed toward the solution much more accurately than if we try, and try, and try, which we have to do, but the more that we can understand the why of it, then the more accurate our decision making can be.
It does not substitute for what’s out there. All of that knowledge is fantastic and useful, and should be applied. All of our personal experiences, the people that work in childcare, they have so much knowledge and so much experience in their realm. It’s very impressive.
Communicating the Importance and Science of Making Memories
to Parents & Families
Shannon:
One of the roles that we end up in as childcare providers is often as a parenting educator or a listening ear for parents, especially young parents, first-time parents, or even grandparents who are providing a caregiver role. How can we share the information and that idea that we are memory makers with parents in a way that is productive and helpful?
Thomas C. Rector:
The tool for sharing this information is the folder that each person walks out of one of our trainings with. It has the information in there to be able to provide knowledge.
The methodology is that we don’t address what they’re doing, we address what is happening in the child.
For most of the voting public, they just don’t have that level of knowledge. It’s not delivered at school, it’s just not typically available.
My personal experience is it’s completely understandable, it’s not rocket science. It connects to their own experiences, sometimes a great deal, sometimes lesser, but it always connects.
The methodology for doing it is to start with not the explicit thing, but start with the child - where are they, what’s happening with them with regard to being a human and how they process the world.
When you do that and you can see that, then it becomes obvious that memories are the place that we get to make a difference. Understanding how those occur and what’s in those memories is profound and it’s simple to understand.
I speak to, probably starting from 11 or 12 years old, children, and I teach the same information that I teach to the adults, and they absolutely get it. They get it within the context of their experience in life, but they get it. It’s not complicated.
I would start with that. Then by doing that, it isn’t about the parent anymore, that they didn’t do this right or they should have done this, or whatever those contexts are.
It’s about what we’re doing for the child, how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it, and why it makes a difference and how it connects.
It also really helps because so much of our parenting, teaching, and childcare, we can’t see. We can’t see those memories, we can’t put our fingers on them.
In the past, our knowledge level of the science has been highly based off of empirical observation kinds of things. Now we can see yes, it’s happening, yes, that’s there, yes, I made a difference, and yes, it will be used somewhere along the line.
It gives a grounding to the parent and the childcare person, and any other adult that is involved, it gives them the grounding and the confidence that I am making a difference.
We have things in our society, our culture, and one of them is very specific that we need consistency, we need to be consistent.
We’ve shown that empirically over and over again, but when we’re told that you need to be consistent, it isn’t being sat upon anything more than a statement.
When you bring the BioSocial Cognition in and understand the memories that are in there, then the idea of consistency makes absolute ground level connection, understanding of why that’s important. That’s a why answer. Why should I be consistent?
Going to the question, how do we approach the parent?
As you said, parents are typically younger, they have the ride to ride yet. We don’t seem to go through a vigorous training of how to do the parenting thing, we draw upon what we experienced or draw upon the people that are around us.
There’s plenty of space to be able to add more knowledge and fit in. People want to do the right thing.
How Early Childhood Educators & Child Care Providers Can Partner with Parents
Shannon:
We’re creating memories with the parents as well. I know as a childcare provider, I used to provide a little sheet of things that happened during the day, what they ate, different things that they might have done or were interested in that day, or other things that came up as kind of that hand-off to the parent at the end of the day.
It’s the end of the day, there’s a lot happening, but we can plant these seeds that create memories for the parents as well.
There are so many more things that we could go into, but we are at time right now. Do you have any last thoughts that you want to share before we shut down?
Thomas C. Rector:
I would encourage for everyone who has the opportunity to go to the trainings, when they walk out of there, we always have a full color printout of all the PowerPoint slides and information in there, and there’s links.
I would encourage them to see that as a resource to supplement their conversation.
I would encourage them to see that as an explicit reference point in being able to bring the knowledge and share the knowledge. I think it’s a great tool to do that with.
Shannon:
I know that handout is also available to download in the online recorded training as well, so for those who have the online recorded training, they should be able to find that handout in the portal.
You’d be able to print that out and use it as a tool for communication with your parents and with some of your older school-age kiddos.
Thank you very much for taking the time to go a little deeper with this. We will see you next time.
Accessing Support & Training
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