N is for Nurture and Love Matter: The ABC of Nursery Management
This article is taken from our 2025 edition of the ABC of Nursery Management guide. You can explore more topics and expert insights by downloading your copy here.
Nurture and love matter
Do you love the children in your care? Do you talk about love and nurture in daily practice? As our understanding of neuroscience grows regarding the importance of attachment and trauma-informed practices, the words’ love’ and ‘nurture’ are making a comeback.
Children’s brains grow rapidly throughout early childhood, and practitioners are often described as ‘brain architects’ – their attachments with children being the vital foundation for lifelong relationship building. In addition, the newly established study of epigenetics removes the nature-nurture debate and demonstrates the importance of nurturing environments for gene expression. Therefore, the science confirms what has been observed for decades in practice: For healthy child development, relationships, love and nurture matter.
What do we mean by love and nurture?
In our book, Love and Nurture in the Early Years (Bradbury and Grimmer, 2024, p. 24), we use an analogy to explain what we mean by loving and nurturing children:
Often, the phrase lovingly nurtured is used when thinking about tending to a garden, which implies a longer-term commitment. To lovingly nurture our children, we meet their immediate needs with a long-term view, just as we might nurture a seed, knowing that we are helping a plant or flower to grow. Our focus is broadly on the bigger picture, however, we still need to manage the details as we feed and water the seedling and make sure the environment offers enough light and nutrients daily for it to grow.
In our settings, this is about relational practice, seeing children’s behaviour as communicating needs and emotions, building secure attachments, scaffolding learning, including emotional and behavioural learning and responding to the child ‘In the NOW!’ We can also hold children in mind and work out and speak their love languages to enable them to feel more loved and nurtured.
Measuring love and nurture
As abstract terms, love and nurture are difficult to measure; however, we can clearly observe both in action within our practice. The Early Years Love and Nurture Rating Scale, based on ECERS and ITERS, attempts to do this as it highlights 5 areas where we can observe love and nurture and see its impact in tangible ways. The 5 sections are:
- Belonging – building an established connection, allowing children to feel ‘at home’, comfortable and included in our settings. Ensuring children feel Safe, Soothed, Seen and Secure.
- Becoming – recognising that children develop at different rates and are growing and developing to meet their potential. Being aware of the impact of and supporting children through change and transition.
- Being – engaging in sensitive and responsive interactions, attuning to children emotionally and being interested in children’s lives helps to support their growing sense of self and identity.
- Believing – allowing children agency and developing their self-efficacy demonstrates that we believe in their capabilities. Providing a nurturing environment where children are active participants who can make choices and have a voice.
- Loving interactions – engaging in warm and loving interactions every day, using positive consented touch and interacting sensitively. Being emotionally literate and using a variety of interaction techniques.
Many settings are choosing to use the rating scale alongside other audit and self-evaluation tools because we value what we measure. As the 2015 Children’s Society Good Childhood Report highlighted, “If [settings] do not measure the wellbeing of their children, but do measure their intellectual development, the latter will always take precedence.” We need to start measuring what really matters, and Love and Nurture matter.
Love and Nurture is not a fad or fashionable idea – but an evidence-informed ethos that is not always easy to implement. It takes hard work, commitment and buy-in from all members of the team; however, in adopting a more loving and nurturing approach today, we are helping to create a more loving and nurturing society tomorrow. Love and nurture matter.
Find out more about Tamsin’s and Aaron’s book Love and Nurture in the Early Years by clicking here.
The ABC of Nursery Management 2025 | FREE Download
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About the Author
Tamsin Grimmer, Early Years author and educator, is Director of Linden Learning, Principal Lecturer at Norland College, and an associate of Early Education. An advocate of loving pedagogy, she supports teachers through training, writing, and research, drawing on extensive experience to inspire dynamic, reflective, inclusive early childhood practice. Aaron Bradbury is Principal Lecturer in Early Childhood at Nottingham Trent University, Co-Chair of the Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network, and a contributor to Birth to Five Matters. A published author and consultant, he champions inclusion, diversity, and the child’s voice at the heart of early years practice.