Still Lost in Translation: Realistic Child Care Program Practices

The Gap between Policy & Theory

According to several recently published studies and data, the quiet revolution continues in how young children are being brought up in the world’s industrialized countries. In the world’s riches nations more and more children are spending longer hours in “out-of-home" or group care beginning at earlier ages (UNICEF, 2008). A stark reality remains: even in the best situations…group care experienced by an infant is often a rotating series of caregivers- essentially strangers- who struggle to meet the physical, emotional and cognitive needs of several infants and or toddlers. As well-meaning, energetic, nurturing, and loving as these caregivers may be, they may simply not be able to authentically connect in the ongoing close emotional interactive patterns during group care situations that are believed by neuroscientific researchers to be essential to healthy emotional, cognitive, and brain development.

What we know about the “Dance of Development”

Imagine the ideal exchanges as an intimate dance of responses to experiences shared between a parent and child that builds neurological circuitry and fosters the child’s growing ability to act on his own. Researchers believe that the best interactions must offer the following characteristics in order for this magic dance of development to unfold.

• Every baby needs to be the apple of someone’s eye…someone who shares a sparkle and a special smile of understanding. Every growing baby and child needs their very own "special person," someone who is especially attuned to the history of his or her unique experiences.
• Non-verbal babies especially need an adult guide who can interpret their individual “signals” and attempts to communicate. This guide lovingly helps them to learn how to learn about and “navigate” around their culture and the physical world.
• Our youngest children need adults who have the time, understanding and flexibility to engage in one-to-one interactions that are sensitive, reciprocal, and intimately shared exchanges as part of a loving “dance.”

What can we do?

Traditionally, a parent has filled the role of adult guide and shared the loving “dance” with young children. But how does a guilt ridden working parent manage? Cathleen Sherry, an Australian human rights lawyer believes the responsibility of child rearing comes with a harsh truth. She states, “No one has the absolute right to a career – men or women. If you chose to have children, your major responsibility is to care for them properly, and if that affects your career, it affects your career (Biddulph, 2006).” While this is a strong and controversial statement in the eyes of many working parents, the statement reinforces what we in the field of early childhood know: children require great care and attention, and that is expensive. Parents have to be wiling to sacrifice time and money and resist putting their children in cheap substandard care.

Many parents must work or choose not to provide care for their children, so we have to have the chutzpah to tell it like it is… we must be sure parents understand they either have to care for their children at home OR must pay well for high quality early child care. The best programs will cost more in order that they in turn can pay staff employees well. Simply logic dictates that when high-quality programs pay caregivers and providers a professional wage, they will have better trained educators and less staff turnover thus resulting in more responsive care for children. Why is this so important? Because research shows that babies and toddlers need consistent, ongoing, responsive care by adults who know how to dance with them.

What’s the Plan?

Its simple... in 2009 lobby your state representatives in Washington DC for:

• More public funding for effective services and policies for children under 3
• The creation of a Department of Early Childhood and School Readiness which ensures the research is considered by policymakers and provides national guidelines for oversight.
• Tuition tax credit for all caregivers or providers who attend and complete early childhood education classes
• A national standard of lower child–to-adult ratios for infants and toddlers to ensure they have the best opportunities for high quality care.

What's YOUR plan in 2009? Send us your comments!

Resources for further reading:

Biddulph, S. 2006. Raising Babies: Should under 3’s go to nursery? London: Harper Thorsons.

Gerhardt, S. 2004. Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain. New York, NY: Bruner-Routledge.

UNICEF. 2008. The child care transition: Innocenti Report Card 8. Florence, Italy: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.

If Wishes Were Horses...

Among the many changes on the way in Washington come January, none is more eagerly awaited in circles like ours than a renewed emphasis on early childhood education. It’s a topic that is not only near and dear to our hearts; but as early child educators well know—it’s one that makes demonstrably good economic sense.

That said, it’s no foregone conclusion that all will be sunshine and roses from here on out. As with most federal efforts, the devil will be in the details. We’d like to hear from you, our readers and users, as to what the most important elements of a newly strengthened federal early childhood initiative should be. To get an online discussion rolling; here are just a few items we’d like to see:

• A re-emphasis on play as the way young children learn best; this lets those pre-literacy and early mathematical skills emerge naturally, and it focuses attention on each child’s development and progress, not the mastery of “facts.”
• A common sense approach to assessment & reporting—one that is useful and capable of appropriate implementation by caregivers, teachers and programs.
• An emphasis on teacher compensation, training and retention—one that recognizes that 30% teacher turnover does not make for effective instruction.

We’ll stop there, because we’re much more interested in hearing your thoughts and dreams. If you had more money to work with and you could “change the system,” what would early childhood education look like?

We hope you’ll join the conversation!

Read “Obama Pledge Stirs Hope in Early Education” to learn more details online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?hp

The Challenges of Public Pre-K: Organized Chaos or Standardized Childhood?

Despite tight economic times, the nation-wide push for universal Pre-K funded and supported by state and federal legislatures as an integrated program of the public system remains an item on the many agendas. As part of this push, early childhood educators anticipate new challenges helping lawmakers, superintendents, principals, and public school educators understand the unique period of human development that takes place in the years before Kindergarten. Many seasoned public school administrators and principals who have effectively used more traditional teaching strategies to guide and instruct students during the K-12 years based upon a school institutional model, will look at typical high-quality early childhood classrooms and hear only what sounds like noise, and believe they see no measurable learning outcomes and a “lack of classroom management.” The components we strive for in a high-quality early childhood environment may be viewed as a classroom in chaos.

Early childhood classrooms are messier, noisier, require flexibility in daily schedules and reflect a variety of discipline techniques that may seem quite different from those that are appropriate for older grade school children. In addition to these outward differences, Pre-K needs smaller class sizes, special materials and room furnishings– that look like “toys” to many principals, and additional staff in order to provide adequate supervision and care. Total all these factors up with the pressure school systems are under to get children “ready for Kindergarten” and then “Third grade testing,” and many administrators simply see the Pre-K years as race to get the children quiet, lined up and seated. With misguided – but honorable - intentions to bring the Pre-K classrooms and teachers “up to speed” and in-line with the quiet, independent seat-work model required take a standardized test, they risk making a critical blunder.

This is not a new dilemma – for decades the early childhood community has struggled against the introduction of “academic” content into early learning environments, now they will also have to resist the attempts to fit the early years into an “institutional model.” We’ve learned from conversations with supervisors of early childhood curriculum and instruction in school districts around the country that many administrators will adopt school-wide policies for conduct, class management, and evaluation of learning that may be very damaging to the youngest children in their schools. If this is a challenge for your early childhood staff, we’d like to offer a few rules that you can share with the principals and other administrators who visit your classroom to help them better understand the characteristics of a high-quality early learning environment and see the reasons we cannot just standardize expectations we hold for young children in the Pre-K years.

Golden Rules for Organized Chaos:

1. “Work & Play” appear interchangeable. Children are joyfully engaged in doing learning, practicing, and trying tasks in a variety of activities in meaningful ways during a time period or “center time.”
   
2. Listen to the “beautiful noise!” Children’s voices are heard! Children are talking, sharing, and interacting with peers and adults as they participate in the variety of activities.
   
3. All efforts are displayed and celebrated. Children’s work and “products” show a great deal of individual variation – and rather than being displayed with a “grade” or evaluative comment by an adult – the work includes the child’s thoughts about the process of what he did or learned.
   
4. Now you see it-now you don’t. A consistent framework is in place but, the expert planning of the educators is “flexible & invisible.” The children have choices and move about the room freely to places of both quiet reflection and interactive “work & play.”
   
5. Prove it works! Utilize a formative assessment program such as PreschoolFirst.com which weaves developmental learning behaviors appropriate for children 0-66 months of age into play-based curriculum activities to help educators evaluate the meaningful learning naturally inherent in high-quality early childhood classrooms so staff can share those outcomes with parents and administrators.

Share these resources with the decision makers in your district!

National Association of Elementary School Principals. 2005. Executive Summary Leading Early Childhood Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able To Do. Alexandria, VA: Author.

Bredekamp, Sue, & Carol Copple (Eds.) 2009. Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs: Serving children birth through age 8. Third. ed. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.