Tonya Cater

I attribute my success to wanting to make my space nurturing and loving for my students, for my kids as I call them. I take the time to love and hug on them as much as they need, and I feel that is one of the things that sort of sets me apart, because after COVID, nobody wants to hug anyone anymore - nobody wants to get too close. But children need that. They need to be loved on, they need to be hugged on, they need to be told that they're great, they're awesome, and that they can do whatever they put their minds to. But we also have to nurture that. In order for us to nurture that, we have to give them that respect and give them that feeling that they can come to us for that.

The best career advice I've received is that if you do what you love, you're not actually working. I love what I do, so when I come to work, it's not necessarily like a job to me, not a typical job. The main thing about this profession is you have to love what you do. It's not something that you're gonna get rich on, so if you're in it for that, you're not gonna get rich doing this. But you can get rich in relationships and fostering lifelong learning in children.

Never stop learning about your profession. There's always some new strategies, new guidelines, new coping messages, anything to get you through. It's not just what you learn in school, because some of the stuff that you learn in school, you can't use in your classroom, or they don't give you enough information in the classroom. So you have to go beyond that, especially nowadays with the children who are coming into the classroom. There are a lot of things that I didn't learn in my bachelor's degree that I had to go outside - I had to read books, I had to go to webinars, I had to do other things to get information on what I needed so I can better serve my children. You just have to be a lifelong learner. You just have to be able to cope and to be lenient and swerve with the times.

I think now, the greatest challenge in our field is to get committed people to be a part of it. A lot of people come in it with the wrong mindset, and they don't understand what all is involved. When you come into an early childhood setting, it's not always gonna be roses and sunshines and unicorns. You have days when you look back on it and you're like, I am not going back, I don't want to deal with it. But you just sort of can't do that, because daycare is run on child-staff ratios. So if a staff member doesn't come back because they can't handle a child, or they don't want to do this, that, and the third, it sort of messes up the flow of the whole center. It's just having committed people who understand that you're in it for the love of children, to see them grow and to see them thrive. You have to take time for that to come into fruition - it's not gonna just come automatically. You have to work at it. Some people just don't want to do the work.

The values most important to me are honesty, learning to be empathetic to others, and being a good listener. You sort of have to be in this profession, to parents as well as children. Parents have to be a part of your class, so in order to make them a part of your class, you have to bring them in, you have to talk to them, you have to listen to what they say, because they're the child's first teachers, literally. They know their children. So you sort of have to listen to what they're telling you, and then feed off of that.