SEnsitive Care: Understanding and REsponding - Promoting Sensitivity in Center-based Childcare of 0-2 Year Old Children (the SECURE Project)

Background:

It is well-established that children's early attachment relationship experiences with their primary caregivers play an important role in psycho-social development. However, it has been shown that also the child's relationship with other important caregivers, such as early professional caregivers in childcare, is important for socioemotional and academic development. In particular, if a child grows up in an at-risk context the quality of early childcare is pivotal for long-term development.

Children with an insecure attachment to their parents are at heightened risk for developing insecure attachments to professional caregivers. However, caregiver interactive skills are found to be associated with children's attachment security to professional caregivers, irrespective of the child's attachment relationship to the primary caregiver. Therefore, professional caregivers' ability to establish optimal interactions with the children in their care provides an important target of intervention in terms of promoting healthy child development.

In a randomized waitlist control trial, this study aims to

1. investigate the efficacy of COS-C in enhancing caregivers' interactive skills when interacting with groups of children in a natural busy real-life setting, their mind-mindedness (MM), and their work-specific resources to cope with stress.
2. investigate if changes in the caregivers' mind-mindedness is related to changes in their interactive skills.
3. explore if effects of the COS-C are moderated by personal and structural factors, here operationalized as the caregivers' own attachment style and staff stability.
4. evaluate the implementation of the COS-C by examining childcare providers' experience of the intervention's acceptability and feasibility, and we will examine the degree to acceptability and feasibility are related to the intervention's effectiveness. Investigating feasibility and acceptability of the COS-C intervention is essential in terms of evaluating the potential for up-scaling and further implementation of the intervention in Denmark
5. employing a qualitative approach we investigate a) how the caregivers and their managers make sense of changes caused by the intervention and b) how the caregivers experience the intervention in terms of its feasibility and acceptability when implemented in their daily practice.