Janet Gonzalez-Mena is a writer, trainer, and consultant in early childhood education, with an emphasis on infants, toddlers, and integrating cultural differences into programs. She started as an early childhood education practitioner and later became a community college instructor at Napa Valley College, retiring in 1998.
Gonzalez-Mena is author of the PITC caregiver guide on Routines and has contributed to other PITC guides as well. She has been writing and revising college textbooks and since the
1970’s, She has also written many articles, some of which have appeared in Young Children. She co-authored two articles with Initisar Shareef, one about their experience of doing PITC training for Exchange magazine and one about cultural perspectives on discipline for the NAEYC journal Young Children.
Gonzalez-Mena did an internship under Magda Gerber at the Children's Health Council in Palo Alto, California. More recently, she has been studying the Pikler approach to infant toddler care and has visited the Pikler Institute in Budapest several times as well as being part of a group that provides Pikler training in the USA. Infants have been an important part of Janet's life, having raised five children of her own and having studied the field of infant-toddler caregiving for the last thirty-seven years.
Gonzalez-Mena obtained a BA in English from University of California, Davis and an MA in human development from Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena.