Childrenology

 Prologue: “Teacher, Teacher, what do you see?” A new call to action.

With gratitude to Bill Martin, Jr and Eric Carle (from, of course, Brown Brown Bear, What do you see?)

I am writing about children in child care (and day care).

I am writing to describe what I think is invisible to most adults – what the experiences of children might actually feel like underneath what we see as their “behavior”.  The meaning we make of their behavior is sometimes so influenced by what we want to see, expect to see or what our culture has primed us to see, that we don’t fully understand the impact our interpretations have on young children.  This is not intended to scold anyone using child care or working in child care.  It is my attempt to reveal and lift up  the reason that our profession fights so hard for what we sanguinely call “quality” child care.  

Children do benefit when they are with other children and in the care of adults other than their parents and family.  But the nature of that care has a significant impact on their well being and development.  I hope that with an inside vantage point for understanding children’s behavior, we can better support good teachers and programs and make the best possible choices for our children.

These stories are intentionally limited to three-year-old white children, whose parents are working and need child care.  I am narrowing this perspective to hold off the unavoidable interpretations that would be applied to children who are of color or from any diverse background.  We live in a biased society and I am putting blinders on only to make a point.  By focusing on young white children I am trying to unpack “children” writ large, knowing full well that white children do not represent all children but that white children’s behavior is not as quickly, unfairly or negatively labelled with inevitable unconscious prejudice.  If these scenarios reflect an imagined typical experience of white children, they most certainly under-represent the experience of all the children who also carry the burdens of prejudice, poverty, disability, and more.

Each story is told from the perspective of an imagined child – of course that is presumptuous.  My story is constructed out of my own observations and experiences; it likely will test our best intentions for child care to be great.  I am holding some presumptions in these stories – I assume all parents want what is best for their children (thank you, Touchpoints).  I assume teachers are doing the best they can with what they know, how they are feeling themselves and with the resources available to them, both in their preparation as teachers and within this model of child care in America.

I also assume what the research confirms – that all children are learning all the time – they are learning about themselves, about people, relationships, about their environment.  I also assume that at age three, (and of course for all development) relationships are the most important single factor influencing what and how children learn.  Early brain development research explains that our brains process all information first through the emotional filter of our limbic system, which has no access to language or to the executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex.  These are simplistic, but basically true, premises which I overlay with the developmental, psychological expectations of three year olds – all of whom are individual, with individual temperaments and experiences.  Child care is never a one-size-fits-all experience for children.