A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Nursery School Founder Gives Advice on Web

The dark-haired 4-year-old had overpowered his light-haired classmate, strategically using his weight to pin him to the floor.

The subjugated boy kept screaming in protest.

“You watch their faces,” said Bette Simons, founder of the First Step Nursery School and Child Development Center in Woodland Hills, where she’s cared for hundreds of children over the years. “If they’re smiling, it’s just boy play.’

Sure enough, the light-haired boy was smiling in between the screams, and Simons moved along.

Simons, mother of three and grandmother of two, has acquired some common-sense approaches to child care, knowing when to step in to trouble, when to stay out, and how to divert all that energy in the right directions.

Since May, Simons’ advice has been bouncing around the country and the world, reaching as far away as the Middle East, via the Internet.

“There were a few bugs when it first went up,” said Marilyn Llanos, director of the nursery school for the past year and a half. It was Llanos’ idea to put a collection of child-care articles by Simons on the Internet. It took three months of work to build the site--with the help of her husband, a computer network administrator--and a little longer to work out the bugs.

“It just exploded in the last two months,” said Llanos, showing a stack of paper with the record of the hundreds of Internet users who have logged onto the site.

“It hasn’t brought us any new business,” Simons said, but that was never the point. The First Step Nursery School has a comfortable enrollment of 50 children from age 2 through kindergarten. The two merely wanted to develop a way to get useful information to parents about child-rearing.

Among those who have sent e-mail were a mother in Berkeley, thanking them for an article on fathers who stay at home to care for the children, and the head of a child-care center in Saudi Arabia who said hello.

So far, biting is the most popular subject on the site. Many of those who log on to the site typically pull up Simons’ article on it.

“Because biting is a problem,” said Simons. Two-year-olds may often start biting other children at a child-care center as the only way to express frustration without vocabulary.

“Control your indignation,” Simons writes in an article on the Web site. “And ask all the wide-eyed children who are watching to give a hug to the crying child and reassure all of them, especially the biter, you don’t want anyone to be hurt. Make a mental note to catch the biter doing something right and praise him or her soundly. . . . If we can’t control our feelings, are we fair to expect 2-year-olds to control theirs?”

Simons wrote the articles in the 12 years since she founded the nursery school. So far, only 10 are on the Internet, but Llanos expects to put more of Simons’ articles on the Web site soon, in addition to some of her own.

Simons began working on a master’s degree in child development at Cal State Northridge when her children were in high school.

“We like to think child-care centers are an extended family,” Simons said. It’s important to reassure parents that they are not alone in dealing with their children’s problems, which is another reason for the Web page.

The Web site is at https://www.1stStep.com

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