The Pyramid Model for Promoting Social Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children
How It Works
The Pyramid Model builds upon a tiered public health approach to providing universal supports to all children to promote wellness, targeted services to those who need more support, and intensive services to those who need them.
Systems Thinking
Relationships begin in the home and classroom, but progress often happens in the system. That’s why the Pyramid Model helps states, communities, and programs build a system based on evidence-based practice and implementation science.
Positive Relationships
When adults model healthy behavior between peers, children can learn to express their emotions, use self-control, and make friends. But, we believe this learning is best supported when there is nurturing and responsive caregiving.
Supportive Environments
Creating environments that support social-emotional development, and school readiness is critical for all children. Your staff can use easy-to-implement strategies to improve learning, while also preventing challenging behaviors.
Individualized Intervention
We offer strategies that help providers identify and support infants and young children when persistent, challenging behavior occurs. Because of this, children can experience supportive learning environments that promote positive growth and development.
what it looks like
Intervention which is comprised of practices related to individualized intensive interventions. The tertiary level of the Pyramid Model describes the need to provide individualized and intensive interventions to the very small number of children with persistent challenges.
- Individualized Intensive Interventions
- Family-centered, comprehensive interventions
- Assessment-based
- Skill-building
Prevention which represents practices that are targeted social emotional strategies to prevent problems. The prevention level includes the provision of targeted supports to children at risk of challenging behavior.
- Targeted Social Emotional Supports
- Explicit instruction and support
- Self-regulation, expressing and understanding emotions, developing social relationships and problem-solving
Universal supports for all children through nurturing and responsive relationships and high quality environments. At the universal level we include the practices needed to ensure the promotion of the social development of all children.
- High-Quality Environments
- Inclusive early care and education environments
- Supportive home environments
- Nurturing and Responsive Relationships
- Essential to healthy social development
- Includes relationships with children, families and team members
The model is supported at the foundation by an effective workforce. The foundation for all of the practices in the Pyramid Model are the systems and policies necessary to ensure a workforce able to adopt and sustain these evidence-based practices.
WHo uses it?
The Pyramid Model provides guidance for:
- early childhood special education
- early educators
- early intervention
- family child care providors
- families
- other professionals
WHo created it?
The Pyramid Model was developed by two national, federally funded research and training centers: The Center for the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL) and Technical Assistance Center on Social Emotional Intervention for Youth Children (TACSEI). These centers’ faculty represent nationally recognized researchers and program developers in the areas of social skills and challenging behavior. It is our goal to provide states with the technical assistance and training to establish the systems and policies needed to adopt and sustain the implementation of the Pyramid Model. NCPMI is focused on the implementation of the Pyramid Model to promote the social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes of young children birth to five, address disparities in discipline practices, promote family engagement, use data for decision-making, and foster inclusion of children with, and at risk for, developmental delays and disabilities.