Category Archives: Blog

14 Dec

Choose your own adventure – it depends.

Choose your Own Adventure  Maybe you are of a mind to think that this is a good learning opportunity for Johnny.  He experiences a “moderate” amount of stress and is learning how to be tough and self sufficient- something we value in American children. And that could be what is happening – but it depends on what happens next and there are a number of important possibilities.

    Maybe his teacher realizes Johnny hasn’t had much experience with other kids – a new Covid norm.  She appreciates that he may not yet know about sharing – its a sophisticated skill for any three yr old but appropriately it is a newly developing one for that executive function part of the brain.  To share, Johnny must have learned to control his impulses, to wait, and to trust that he will get his turn soon.  His teacher might sit with Johnny and walk through a sharing episode with getting a car to play with, from start to finish,  so that he learns how this sharing thing works.  In this scenario Johnny  will also learn that his teacher will help him – so he learns to trust (and listen to) her.  

    Or maybe Johnny’s teacher has so many children in her classroom that she doesn’t notice or she doesnt think its important to assist Johnny with this skill. After all, some kids in here know how to share – whats the matter with this new kid – grabbing, entitled, aggressive?  Or maybe she thinks he will figure it out himself – which could happen, if he has a temperament that can be patient, persistent and/or he is not too hungry or tired to switch on some executive thinking.  But what if he is a young three and doesn’t have the capacity to wait quite yet ?  Maybe the stress of being in this new place, alone, makes sharing impossible today because he is on his last (limbic) nerve.  

    Whichever teacher response he gets can set the trajectory for both his and the teacher’s expectations and we know how that ends -You get what you expect to get.   And all of this conjecture does not take into account the temperament, development or issues of the other child(ren).  If Johnny has inadvertently provoked someone’s tantrum – who is to blame?  Who will the teacher be mad at?

    Of course we have just described – at most 20 minutes – of a child care event in which an individual child’s development is evident.  (Hint:  they all are).   Now we are about to encounter the next predictably contentious event of the day: Clean Up Time.  Johnny: “What?????”

Johnny  may have been asked to put toys away at home (maybe not) but likely there haven’t been so many WRONG places to put things.  Nor has it been so loud and confusing with everyone singing some crazy song and moving quickly.  If Johnny had been getting used to things, now his limbic system switches right back on.

Johnny’s bumpy first day can be…okay.  If it goes very badly Johnny’s behavior will let us know – tears, hitting, defiance, withdrawal.  Will he want to come back tomorrow?  It depends.  

Oh, and does Johnny speak the same language as his teacher?

11 Dec

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.

10 Dec

Childrenology – Chapter One

Chapter One – Johnny

Johnny gets awakened by his Mom at 7am.  She reminds him it’s his first day of big boy school and he needs to hurry to get ready!  A cereal breakfast, some cajoling, looking for shoes, Mom packs a backpack – what’s in that backpack?  nothing.  She forgets to put a clean set of weather-appropriate, labeled, extra clothes in a plastic bag in there. But everyone has a backpack with something cool on it so Johnny does too.  

She drives Johnny to ABC Little Learners Academy, which she calls “daycare” so that’s what Johnny calls it too.  She carries him in, puts him down in the foyer where she signs him in and then walks him down the hall to his classroom.  Johnny: “what is happening? What is happening? What is happening?  Where are we going? What is happening? It smells funny here.  What is happening?”  Johnny’s limbic system is perfectly responding, sensing that anything  unfamiliar is potentially dangerous.  He is on high alert, curious and cautious.  Mom says “Here we are!”  and they stand in the doorway of a brightly colored, rather hysterically decorated room that is noisy, smelly and full of moving things that are, he senses correctly, other children!  This is maybe ok and interesting and Mom is talking to a woman and he is shown his cubby where his backpack gets put.   As he is biologically adapted to do, he is checking out the environment to the degree his senses are comfortable.  After one minute, the noise and colors begin to overwhelm him and his eyes are wide.  It is at this moment, unfortunately, that Mom announces she is leaving.  him.  here.  now.   The other woman is talking to him but because his limbic system is fully in charge, he is not really hearing her, nor is he able to answer her questions. He shrinks against his mom and now she is anxious – about his discomfort, his refusal to go play, the judgment of the teacher? or is it the director? and that she is in danger of being late to work.  And she hasn’t paid the center yet – can she get out the door without them asking her for money she doesn’t have until payday?

Back to Johnny.  The woman – his teacher – gives up or gets distracted and leaves him alone to “get comfortable.” A good healthy limbic response for him is to freeze in place until he understands what is happening.  He never really does.  But he sees nearby children playing on the floor with cars so he goes and stands there and watches for a bit.  After a few minutes, Play With Cars wins and he sits down and tries to get a car to play with but when he picks one up, another child yells bloody murder and an angry grown up comes over and takes the car out of his hand, speaks in a scolding way, and then leaves.  Johnny moves away and resumes watching. A typically developing child with a temperament that is curious, mildly anxious (appropriately so) and a determination to survive – he has a trait optimistically called ‘grit’ and Johnny survives the first hours of day care.

Did Mom or the teacher do anything wrong? This is a pretty typical description. No one meant for Johnny to be upset.

07 Dec

Paleo child care

The other day my 7 yr old grandson began a conversation/debate with “in my opinion”.  Blessings upon whomever taught him that.  It’s a necessary preamble.

Which made me think about how, in my opinion, we have not traveled very far out of the box when thinking about how to re-create or restore child care for parents who are working.  The nerd in me was intrigued and thrilled with the quick cultural adoption of the Paleo Diet and the rationale that surely thousands of years would have insight and wisdom into how we eat and how we raise our offspring.  Limitations of the Paleo Diet notwithstanding, I think we should be curious about how we raised our ‘offspring’.

I think anthropology has assured us that we didn’t group offspring into the same age groups, like a litter of pups, and “manage” them all day.  And at the same time if no one cared for them – even only casually – we wouldn’t be here. (think tigers).

My research into the literature suggests we ceded protection and entertainment of children to a perhaps fluid group  of trusted adults until children returned to the care of their parents.  I doubt we assigned that responsibility to the group member we trusted the least (or “paid the least”) or that we expected that one individual would spend all sunlight hours only chasing children.  This gem of an article sent by my fellow ponderer of such things, suggests that children’s young brains  are wired to form a number of relationships, all of which need to be secure and kind, if not fond, and presumably with group members who liked children, not to control freaks or warm bodies or bullies.  (Since I am a teacher of young kids I can say that.. I bet big sisters and cousins were likely recruits and mothers of other youngsters, already engaged in the preservation of the offspring.  And for goodness sakes, fathers!

My point here is that, in my opinion, we have stubbornly stuck to the Industrial Revolution model in care and education and I am thoroughly alarmed at the results.  We can wrap our minds around the legitimate craving of an occasional Paleo steak but we can’t integrate the science that tells us that our offspring thrive when they play?

That is pretty far out of the box for us, but if we can entertain Paleo, we can entertain re-imagining how best to care for, protect and “educate” our children.  Because we are doing a terrible job at it.  Turns out you don’t even need the tiger.

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-hunter-gatherer-approach-childcare-key-mother.html#google_vignette

29 Sep

children going over the child care “cliff”

As federal dollars supporting child care during the pandemic dry up at the end of September, we are all watching, noting and bemoaning the serious impact it will have on employers, parents, child care businesses and teachers. Yet, woe is the society that treats its families as financial commodities only. There are children in there – who learned to say goodbye to Mommy and Daddy every morning by connecting with Miss Mary, or Kashama or Claudia (all real teachers I know). But those children who will see teachers leave because of this event are set to suffer disruptions in one or more of their primary relationships. We like to think kids are resilient (and of course many are by nature or in the right circumstances), but breaks, especially abrupt ones, in the relationships that are the building blocks of trust and interactions, erode and complicate young children’s sense of safety and predictability in the world. We grown ups complain about change and stress, but its a biological event and it effects early brain development (see https://developingchild.harvard.edu/) if you need convincing.

The reason that the adults in child care are worthy of professional wages and compensation is that their skills and knowledge about this important relationship have a profound effect on young children. But when predictable, kind adults disappear abruptly, it sends a biological message to the brain and influences responses and other relationships. Efforts to mitigate that will help – other familiar teachers, visits, talking about it. But the continued callousness and self-centered attitudes of our society and government will impact young children – who will become adolescents – and eventually just and trusted adults (or not).

23 Sep

“How are the children?”

“How are the children?”

Saturday, September 23, 2023

11:53 AM

Many years ago this was a common way we would have opened an early childhood policy conference or training conversation.  A reference to a Masai greeting among travelers, it prioritized the welfare of children as the important indicator that it is.  But we have moved a far piece from this wisdom, for a variety of pressing issues. It seems from here that there is more interest in how to convince people to come care for children than whether they are any good at it.  Of course both are necessary efforts but I take the frequent absence of the word “quality” from the conversation about accessibility and affordability as an obvious hint as to where our real efforts are going.  Corporate America wants their money makers (parents) back to work and children are “resilient” anyway. 

I despair at what this means.  We used to spend hours debating what kind of puzzles were developmentally appropriate for 3 yr olds so teachers would score well on environmental rating scales. I have a lot of opinions on the matter actually, so I am talking about myself.  Now I wish we had seen that, in the future, puzzles would become pretty irrelevant and that what we really needed to pay attention to were how the adults were supported to relate – or not – to children.   We apparently went for the “low-hanging fruit” (always a mistake, a misdirection, an easy distraction) and gave less intellectual, policy and emotional energy to the health and strength and wisdom of the teacher her/himself.  Too late, throwing money at them alone will not really nourish them.  When will we realize that the answer to “how are the children” is not really related to “how much does their teacher make”? 

On the other hand, as a dastardly underpaid ece educator for my adult life, believe me, I know how important salary is.  But it is not the only thing – apparently we can think about policy for compensation band-aids (apologies) but not about funding for teacher education, professional development, better working conditions (see actually implemented Model Work Standards) and, finally, professional acknowledgement, sometimes meekly referred to as, respect.

Please lets put ALL the needs of the teachers on the table – not just break times, and bonuses, but child development science and how to tend each child with informed attention and understanding.  Fostering those skills benefits teachers commensurate with their responsibilities, while also helping to inform the answer to “How are the children?”

We can’t be entranced by the very mention of “compensation”. Lets demand what is good for us and the children.

10 Mar

brain research and change

As long as we have been trying to improve the quality of children’s experiences in child care, with limited success, we should be looking in every corner for insight and inspiration. Here is some that I have encountered in a few places, most recently in the BUILD archives, that specifically addresses some of the specific barriers that we don’t, in my opinion, talk about enough.

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10 Feb

Quality Improvement needs improvement?

After 20 odd years of participating in the very well-intentioned field of quality improvement specialists/coaches/consultants I have come to a new sentiment about what works, what doesn’t, and why. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that people don’t really like to be told to change their behavior, even when asked nicely. They may – and often do – smile and say thanks, now I get it – but in fact that changed behavior isn’t going to stick and likely fades along with the smile.

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16 Feb

Testing a “recipe” for quality

Marcy Whitebook at Center for the Study of Child Care Employment http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/cscce/ has a project called No Single Ingredient.  Based on that suggested metaphor, I have tried to visually represent the collection of considerations that go into supporting/improving quality child care experiences.  I want to get a “systems” image that many of us can relate to so that we have the beginning for the systems-building we are undertaking with the addition of mentoring and coaching.  I would really appreciate your comments!