Agrilife Extension Resources

Health and safety of children in care is the #1 priority for all early childhood professionals. Home-based child care has specific requirements that must be addressed to ensure health and safety practices are properly integrated into a home-based child care.

This 2-hour course is for prospective home-based child care business owners and will introduce some of the health and safety standards, best practices, and ways to properly implement these in your home-based child care.

Starting a new home-based child care business involves making a number of decisions including the type of home-based child care to operate and how to incorporate best practices.

Many parents work nontraditional hours, meaning their children need access to early care and education programs outside typical operating hours. In the absence of qualified early care and education programs that offer nighttime care, these families may have to make challenging and precarious choices, choosing between maintaining their employment and leaving their children without the appropriate care.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to support early childhood program owners and directors through the process of incorporating extended hours of care, including overnight care, to support the needs of many families across Texas.

Infants’ experiences early in life literally influence the physical structures of the brain, opening the way for patterns of thought and behavior for the rest of a child’s life. This 1-hour course addresses critical topics related to caring for the youngest and most vulnerable population of children, infants and toddlers.

Abusive head trauma is the leading cause of death in cases of child abuse in the United States. This 2-hour course will help you better understand the dangers of abusive head trauma and how to take steps to protect the children in your care from this type of abuse.

Each workplace interaction is an opportunity to build respectful professional relationships with parents and co-workers. Explore the causes of communication conflicts ,how to resolve them, and effective communication strategies to use with parents and co-workers.

Maintaining the health of young children – and setting them up with lifelong healthy habits – are critical elements of a quality early childhood program. This one-hour course reviews some of the key practices early childhood educators can use to promote breastfeeding and healthy feeding habits in infants. It is aligned with the guidelines of the Texas Healthy Building Blocks recognition program.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is the leading cause of death among babies between 1 and 12 months old. This course will help you learn how to create a safe sleep environment for infants, thus reducing the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, also called SIDS, and other sleep-related causes of death that affect infants.

In this course, you will learn about healthy brain development. We discuss the importance of responsive interactions and secure attachments, how interactions drive language development, the roles of major brain chemicals, the impact of trauma on the developing brain, and strategies for supporting brain development.