Tag: serving parents and caregivers

Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Not Another “Best of” Post

| Jonathan Dolce|Leave a comment
large orange block letters spelling not another

This Is Not Another “Best of” [input year] Post I promise you this is not another Best of [input year] post. In fact, if I were to rename it, it’d be The Most Exciting Stuff in the Youth Services World, like, right now; right now. I like pointing these things out so much I create a biweekly Youth Services newsletter for my colleagues. [mysteriously] Who knows, maybe I’ll unleash it upon the internet in 2021? [strokes goat goatee] It’s loaded with all things frabjous, from live webinars with authors whose work we drool upon to easy crafts, programming ideas, news – [foreign accent] your interest is piqued, no? Oh! And this stuff is all totes free! Sans fees! Gratis! Famous Authors Live! This subheading should read “Not Another Webinar” Probably the most important webinars For the Parents and Caregivers we serve This is not a section about stuff to do…

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New Opportunities: Connecting Virtually with Parents and Caregivers

| Early Childhood Programs and Services committee|Leave a comment

Among the many ways in which it has changed our lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has demanded that library staff responsible for creating and carrying out programming be almost endlessly innovative. I have the privilege of working with and hearing from children’s librarians and staff across Suffolk County, New York, as they’ve navigated our new reality. We’ve had many discussions in programming meetings about trying out new virtual programs only to have them flop, and how much harder the feelings that come with a flopped program can hit these days. However, our discussions, we try to keep present in our minds the fact that our current circumstances provide a silver lining of room to innovate: with patrons’ needs and behaviors upended and changing all the time, the justification for trying new things has never been stronger. One of the programming areas for which there is new potential is virtual programming for…

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Blogger Meg Smith

How to Best Serve Parents of Our Young Patrons

| Megan Smith|1 Comment

 When my husband and I were blessed by becoming first time parents, I was able to see from a personal perspective just how our library system excelled in meeting the needs of caregivers to young children. As I visited the library as a patron with my daughter, I tried to turn away from evaluating the story time as a manager and instead, enjoyed that program as a parent.The question for us working in public libraries is this: are we as children’s librarians giving the caregivers who walk through our doors the same welcoming smile and nonjudgmental attitude we give our youngest patrons?  If the answer is “yes,” do our libraries’ policies and procedures reflect this same view?    At our library system, we do not have age restrictions for our regular story times and do not require registration for these types of programs. While we communicate that story times are geared for a specific age range, we…

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