Hot Spot Number 1

With six days to go until the exam it’s time to tackle the hot spots on the Unit 1 exam. The first one to mention is on attachment. It’s often forgotten about and treated like an add-on…The specification says:How research into attachment and day care has influenced child care practices

There’s good news with this section, and bad news.

So what's the good news?...There are no extra studies or content to learn with this section at all.

And the bad news?...It gets answered badly because students don’t plan for it

So…what should students do?

They need to think about how what they have learnt has been useful in the real world. What has the research changed? The table below shows two ideas for answering this question.

1) Bowlby wouldn’t be a big fan of day care, but his monotropy hypothesis suggests that primary caregivers and continuity of care are all important. The key worker system in nurseries means that there is one designated carer to each child, which helps with attachment formation.

2) Robertson and Robertson’s work on the PDD model showed how much separation from a parent can affect the child psychologically. As a consequence parents are now able to stay with their children in hospital.

There are more possibilities for this section of the specification, and the above are not the only possible examples but it’s a start! Make sure you're ready for it..
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