A reflection for early childhood educators on trust, connection, and the moments that stay with you.
Some of the deepest lessons in early childhood come straight from the children, often the ones who are hardest to reach.
This is a story about one of them, and a single morning in Cranbourne that has stayed with me ever since. It taught me more about connection and the quiet weight educators carry than almost anything else in my career.
“I Don’t Like You. Go Away.”
His voice was sharp and his little face was set. He said , looking right at me.
I had been at the centre for about an hour, sitting in the background while I observed one of my pre-service educators with a small group of children. My job was to assess her teaching, the way she connected with the children and facilitated their play.
The little boy across from me, arms crossed. I had noticed him earlier on the edges of play, sitting a little apart from the others.
There was something uneasy about his presence. I sat on the floor near him, picked up a few plastic dinosaurs, and started to play, giving them voices and letting them stomp and chat. An open invitation, no pressure.
That was when he looked straight at me and said, “I don’t like you. Go away.”
I did not take it personally, of course. What I could see was a little boy for whom closeness felt risky, someone who may have learned that keeping people at a distance felt safer. Attachment theory gives me a lens for noticing this, a way of paying closer attention. It stops well short of letting me label a child I watched for an hour.
So I stayed where I was and kept playing, letting the dinosaurs roar. I said, gently, “I’m sorry you feel that way. I hope we can be friends. It’s safe to play with me.”
He stayed quiet at first. Then he watched. Little by little his posture shifted, his arms loosened, his eyes followed the dinosaurs, and after a while he reached out, took one, and joined in.
The Science of Building Trust
For the rest of my visit he stayed close, near me, watching, following. While I kept my focus on my student and her group, I could feel him settling beside me, minute by minute.
This is what the beginning of trust looks like. It builds slowly and quietly, in a child choosing to stay in the room, in a posture that softens, in a glance held a second longer, in a small hand reaching for a dinosaur. In early childhood, these small moments lay the ground for everything that follows: language, learning, connection, resilience. A child who feels safe can begin to learn, and we see it in the research on stress and the developing brain as clearly as we see it on the mat each day.
Then, as my visit came to an end, something unexpected happened. As I stood to leave, his small hands grabbed the fabric of my skirt and held on tight.
“Don’t go.”
His voice, so firm before, carried an edge of desperation now. The educator gently tried to coax him away and reassure him that I had to go. His little fingers only tightened, and for a moment I felt a lump rise in my throat.
What do you say to a child for whom a goodbye feels this big? I knelt to his level, met his eyes, and reached for the most comforting words I had. “We will see each other again. And the people who care for you are here for you.” I wanted him to feel held, right then.
He stood there as I walked to my car, his small figure framed by the doorway, watching and waiting. And as I drove out of Cranbourne, I started to cry.
What This Means for Early Childhood Educators
Some of the hardest parts of this work sit outside the teaching, the planning, and the frameworks. Sometimes the hardest part is holding children’s emotions and stories. It has been this way for me. That emotional labour, the weight of holding children whose stories we may never fully know, gets far too little airtime in our profession. Here is what that morning reinforced for me.
Rejection is communication. It is a type of behaviour. When a child says “go away,” they may be telling you that closeness feels risky right now. Meet it with steadiness and stay.
What children need is connection. Proximity, consistency and calm are what a child like this reaches for, and staying in the room, gently and without demands, is often the whole of it.
Small moments matter. A child picking up a dinosaur or giving you a look. In the slow building of trust, these are the milestones.
Educator wellbeing counts too. Walking away from a child who is clinging to you is genuinely hard. Naming that, and letting ourselves feel the grief of those goodbyes, is part of practice we can sustain.
A Final Thought
That little boy needed something simple that day. He needed someone who would stay, even as he asked them to go. So often it is the children who push the hardest who are reaching for connection the most. And it is the ordinary Tuesday morning, the dinosaurs, the floor, the patient waiting, that turns out to matter most.
