The important thing about young children is that they are powerful. They are lovable, playful, changing, and vulnerable. But the most important thing about young children, I believe, is their power.1
I see this strength in the lively little children mowing me down to push the elevator buttons at the museum, and in the nosy ones who fire their flummoxing questions at me, rat-a-tat like a snare drum. I see it in the poetic children who imagine possibilities inside a garbage Dumpster, and in the loose-limbed ones sprawled across the subway car like they own the joint, their flushed faces pressed into the vinyl on “my” side of the seat. I see power in difficult and miserable children, too: the four-year-olds throwing tantrums in the supermarket and the toddlers howling with stiffened extremities as the airplane begins its grief-making drop in altitude.
I love young children’s power, which is not to say that it doesn’t burden or annoy me at times, because it does. But my faith in these strong small characters drives this book; and it drives my desire to improve the lives of young children and to alleviate the anxieties of those caring for them—not with magic or money, but with real insights about what we know goes on inside children’s heads.
The Importance of Being Little grew from my experiences as a preschool teacher and director, and from my current work in early childhood education at Yale’s Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy (a branch of the famous Yale Child Study Center founded by the father of the American child development movement, Arnold Gesell). I’m enormously privileged to work in such a storied environment, where I teach college courses on child development and education policy. But my concerns with early learning have more humble roots.
I wanted to teach young children since I was a little girl myself, and passed long hours instructing my stuffed animals in what I thought were the essentials of a good kindergarten education. Mainly, I put them in straight lines and read to them in my hectoring “teacher lady” voice. But because I started college in the early 1980s, in an era when women were finally being allowed to leave the teaching profession to become doctors and Supreme Court justices and astronauts, few of my Harvard classmates wanted to become teachers, and even fewer had any desire to work with untamed tiny pupils who couldn’t master a pencil grip. I remember being dissuaded from my career path by well-meaning female relatives who themselves had spent their careers as teachers. Somehow, I got the message that I was supposed to aim elsewhere, higher.
So I dutifully collected credentials and experiences in the public health field, working with homeless veterans suffering addictions and with subsistence farmers in Africa; counseling indigent adults with schizophrenia; working in philanthropy and as an editor and grant writer in academic health centers. My public health career kept circling around the problems of families, which in turn led me back to the everyday world of very young children, a world that seemed tremendously engaging and intellectually vigorous. It wasn’t lost on me that the giants of educational theory—innovators such as Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori—did their pioneering work with the smallest humans.
I became a mother myself and, starting in the mid-1990s, took occasional jobs, while raising my family, as a substitute teacher at the renowned University of Chicago Lab School, where I was mentored by a master teacher, Marie Randazzo, whom we will meet later in the book. I started teaching in earnest in 2001, and as I spent more time with my own children, while teaching preschool in the mornings and working on my master’s degree and certification in the evenings after my children were in bed, I became even more confused by the mismatch between, on the one hand, the abundant evidence I’d amassed that young children were intelligent, capable people, and on the other hand, the sense I got from the larger world that preschool education was not valued for itself, and that preschoolers themselves were something of an embarrassment. When I accompanied my husband to professional events, I would watch people’s eyes glaze over when they learned I was “just” a preschool teacher. Often the disdain was coupled with an encouraging nod to how amazing it was that I could spend all day doing “God’s work.” These contradictory and condescending reactions rarely connected with what I was experiencing as a teacher; like most people’s ambitions, mine felt neither benighted nor particularly distinguished.
But it was no cakewalk entering the early childhood field after years of delayed aspirations. I can only analogize to learning to drive as a mature adult, which I also found myself attempting relatively late in the game. In both cases, the extra years conveyed a certain prudence and good sense; but they also made the tasks harder because I found myself constantly questioning received wisdom. (“And why, exactly, is that car not going to plow its four thousand pounds of metal into the highway divider?” I’d wonder to myself on my way to work.) There were a lot of things to put into context, for the simple reason that, with age, I had acquired so much context.
Similarly, I began to question a lot of the received wisdom I was hearing in the public sphere about young children: that they were failing in droves; that disadvantaged children couldn’t catch up; that parents were a problem to be managed; that a preschool teacher’s job was primarily to transmit content and skills and to focus on something called readiness. These tenets didn’t match my lived experience with young children and their families.
My unusual path to early education led to one of the key insights I want to share in this book, namely that schooling and learning are often two different things. Young children aren’t blank slates delivered to the preschool classroom by storks, but, rather, they are complex persons who arrive already connected to families, communities, and cultures—environments where they have done an awful lot of learning before they set foot through the door.
That young children learn primarily from their relationships is both an unfamiliar and self-evident reality, but it is a reality that is too often lost in our current debates about what is best for preschoolers. Instead of focusing on the social dimension of learning, we’ve grown overfond of skills and metrics that look nice on paper but don’t really tell us much about what individual human beings do. Even the welcome rediscovery of social skills as a legitimate early childhood enterprise tends to presume that the social life of a child is a deliverable, similar to a curriculum package, rather than a natural incubator for learning itself. Our focus on the location and delivery system of learning, rather than the learning process itself, causes a huge amount of unhappiness for parents and teachers, not to mention for the children themselves, and the stress is palpable everywhere: pick the “wrong” preschool or ease up on the phonics drills at home and your child might not go to college. She might not be employable. Who knows? She might not even be allowed to start first grade! The stress is compounded by the lack of control people feel over the care of young children, which usually takes the form of not enough time, money, and choice. Poor-quality child care remains a bedeviling reality for an unacceptably large percentage of American families, and many of the children who would benefit most from preschool are not enrolled at all.2
Despite all this anxiety, I am an optimist. For one thing, it’s easy to forget that even in the direst of circumstances, young children have the potential to change. Childhood is by its very nature dynamic, and embodied in the definition of child development is the possibility of—no, the mandate for—change. Young children are constantly changing and endlessly surprising, and this is why, I believe, so many people continue to choose the field of early education despite its paltry pay and low prestige.
Another reason for optimism is that the quality and quantity of early learning research has increased dramatically in recent years. Through the doggedness of powerful advocates, greater attention is being paid to translating these scientific results for the people who make public-policy decisions, and more attention is being given to bringing the results into real classroom settings. It’s a slow and uneven process, but it is indeed happening. We’re also seeing an uptick in public and private financial resources devoted to the needs of young children. A recent bill to improve the delivery of subsidized childcare services for low-income families passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and included a large increase in earmarked funds for evidence-based quality improvements.3
So, we are finally paying attention to young children, and just in time, with almost three quarters of four-year-olds now in some form of non-family care.4 Only a few years ago, preschool education was rarely covered in the pages of the New York Times or mentioned in White House briefings, but now it’s become fairly routine to see front-page news coverage and op-eds on early learning by famous political pundits and social scientists. In fact, politicians are running for election on their early education platforms, a truly astounding development to those who’ve long been in the trenches of early education policy. Professional organizations like the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the National Institute for Early Education Research, and Child Care Aware, among many others, are setting a higher bar for developmentally appropriate educational practice, a standard to which programs can aspire, even if they cannot yet achieve it.
With increased public attention to the conditions for healthy child development, and a healthy infusion of new funds to shore up the childcare crisis, we have an opportunity to do things right. But additional resources won’t help if they are thrown at poorly designed programs or at goals that don’t appreciate the gifts young children already have. Unfortunately, if history is any guide (and sometimes it is), we may squander this opportunity through misinterpretation, naïveté, and wrongheadedness.
Let me be clear: my aim is not to invoke nightmares among already sleep-deprived parents. But neither do I want to claim that all is well in the American early childhood landscape today. We have a serious problem, and it goes beyond the dismayingly common reports of school testing mandates run amok, outdoor recess time shelved, and preschoolers pathologized for everyday childhood experiences like daydreaming and clumsiness. It gets at the heart of what we think children can and can’t do.
I believe that we can fix the things that have gone wrong for young children but also, paradoxically, and more importantly, that young children are strong enough to withstand the foolish meddling to which we subject them, if we can just get out of their way.
If I can reassure you of one thing, it is this: getting out of the way is often the best thing we can do for a young child. And I will suggest how to accomplish this getting-out-of-the-way, which is another way of describing what it means to help young children be young children. The process is not so simple as just opening the back door and turning kids loose to get dirt under their fingernails, however. We have more work to do than that, in part because of what I will describe as a kind of habitat loss for young children that needs repairing.
But there’s a straightforward process to doing well by young children, and it’s a process most people will like because it makes sense and comes with the added benefit of not making adults miserable. The first step in the process involves seeing clearly the state of early childhood today, because otherwise the temptation will overtake us simply to write off potential solutions. You might think the answers are all out there already: Sure, I saw that online somewhere. “Kids need more free play and less drilling. . . .” The case for more unstructured play and fewer work sheets has been made many times before, and very effectively, too, but it seems that people aren’t buying this commonsensical prescription or don’t think they have the power to change their child’s preschool environment. It seems, then, that we have a paradox: how to square the widespread availability of sound advice with the ongoing reality of children’s unmet needs. To do that, we need some new answers and new ideas.
Some of the experiences recounted here will make your heart sing, but others will make you cringe. Some will make you worry, and they should make you worry. But bear with me when I say that—to wrangle the old cliché—the early childhood glass is half full, not half empty. The glass may look empty from where you are sitting now, and this is especially true if you are one of the many adults feeling trapped by child-rearing and educational choices not of your own making. But when you see the glass from a different angle—from the side of the child—you will see strength and opportunity in every environment in which we find young children.
But it’s not enough just to open your own eyes; we need to enter deep into the mind-set of a child, which can be a challenge nowadays for several reasons: we’re waiting longer to have our children5 and having fewer of them;6 we’re going outside the home to work more and don’t see children’s routine intimacies up close; and we’re putting more confidence in institutions to instruct and manage young children.7
But there’s another paradox. In our urge to help them, we often “adultify” young children and their surroundings. We want to be close to our children, because we cherish them, but to do that we ask them to conform to our timetable and our tastes. We’ve appropriated their music and books and clothes (the latter is an odd reversal of history’s pattern, as a visit to a museum will attest),8 but what have we given them in return? Adult gadgets and expectations? Unfortunately, the solution requires more than merely reducing screen time and ponying up more Legos. The small window of early childhood is closing its blinds a little prematurely, it seems. For example, 10 percent of eight-year-old girls are now in the early stages of puberty.9 Children themselves are leaving the early years behind with a new urgency.
For these reasons, and others, many of us are unable to answer the question, “What is it like to be a young child?” But the answer is vital, because it is this misunderstanding of early childhood that has tripped us up again and again in our understanding of how and where young children learn, and how best to support them.
In this book, I’m applying a kind of forensic analysis to the whole system of early learning with the hope that, in peeling back the layers of pedagogy, policy, and even mythology that drive the care of our smallest citizens, a new vision of early childhood might emerge that better reflects our young children’s needs and aspirations. The good news is that, with relatively few and relatively easy changes, we can restore childhood’s diminishing habitat and make it better than at any point in human history. By happy coincidence, we have a striking consensus of scientific evidence and centuries of common sense to guide us. Even more fortunately, young children themselves contain within their brains the ingredients for their development. If we observe them carefully, they will show us the way forward.
Young children are far more capable, more intelligent, and more interesting than is typically understood. Like the superheroes so many preschoolers are drawn to, young children have hidden powers. My aim is to reveal those special powers that are too frequently masked by adult misdemeanors and obliviousness. I want to equip you with a game plan as well as a manifesto. To be clear, this is not a how-to guide for setting up a preschool or managing your household; however, in the chapters that follow, I offer a straightforward road map for recognizing signs of powerful learning that can be hard to discern, and I provide concrete recommendations for nurturing young children’s learning impulses wherever we find them. We will find them in many places: in children’s complex artwork and verbal dexterity; in their rewarding friendships and inventive forms of play; in their feats of engineering and scientific discovery; in their probing questions and innate sense of numbers; in their wry observations and sophisticated humor; in their oddball obsessions and relentless work ethic; and, of course, in their boundless curiosity about so many things. This is a road map for all parents, teachers, and policy makers who care about young children, including those needing practical advice to support children faced with less-than-optimal circumstances at home or at school. At the heart of my recommendations lies the relationship with the young child, which is the one learning tool that trumps all others, and it is my fervent hope that parents and teachers will find ways within these pages to deepen their connections to the young children in their care. Doing so is a win-win situation for all involved because learning and love are mutually reinforcing concepts in the mind of a growing child.
People who care for young children try very hard, for the most part, and are vastly undervalued by our society. It is not my intention to shame or pathologize the millions of parents and educators concerned with young children. I wear both the educator and parent hats myself and know how demoralizing it feels when one’s very best efforts unerringly invite disapproval. Few adults are asked to bear as much free-floating scorn as are teachers. Imagine if your local doctor were held personally accountable for the obesity epidemic or the growing incidence of diabetes and teenage suicide: that’s how it feels to be the teacher of young children these days. Parents, too, and especially mothers, are mocked relentlessly, while being held to historically unprecedented standards of excellence. I don’t want to contribute to that blame game.
Instead, I hope to offer a way of making early childhood more visible. Death and birth have long been hidden from everyday life; increasingly, it seems, so is childhood. This is a provocative claim that many will resist. Isn’t American society more child friendly than ever before? Kids, like pets, seem to have proliferated in every corner of contemporary adult life, to the great irritation of an increasingly vocal constituency of child-free Americans. But what has intruded upon adult life is really an ersatz form of early childhood, not the real thing. We are smothering young children with attention and resources, and yet, somehow, we’re not giving them what they really need. This disconnection is a key to solving the bewildering puzzle at the core of this book: how it is that what’s most important about early childhood is so often hardest to appreciate.
Though you might think it odd, I find great insight in a 1974 essay that became famous in the academic world, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”10 In it, American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that the subjective experience of being a bat—we’ll call it “battiness”—can be approximated by the sum of this and that batlike attribute (winged arms and big ears, echolocation, hanging upside down, and so on) but can never be fully understood by humans because we are not, in fact, bats. The essence of being a bat, Nagel contended, is somehow greater than the sum of its individual batlike—and more humanly knowable—parts.
This is the key to unlocking the riddle: what is it like to be a young child? Here, we have a small edge over imagining bats insofar as all readers will have at least had the distant (perhaps very distant) experience of once having been a child. On the other hand, we’ve become increasingly disconnected from early childhood, and from the promise of young lives. We have to try harder to see the power in little children that is hiding in plain sight.
All of the anecdotes are true stories that happened as I describe them or were described to me by colleagues from their classroom and teaching observations, but I have changed some names, pronouns, and other identifying information in places to protect the privacy of children and their families. Dialogue comes from notes and recordings taken during or immediately after my observation.
I make liberal use of female pronouns to describe early childhood teachers. This is a deliberate decision because I don’t want to convey the mistaken impression that the early education field has anything resembling gender balance. Male early childhood teachers are rare (less than 2 percent of all preschool and kindergarten teachers) at least partially due to low preschool teacher salaries and persistent stereotypes about men as caretakers, in addition to men’s own work preferences. I felt it was misleading to imply that it’s common for men to be involved in the care and education of other people’s young children. At this time, it is unusual.
This book is primarily concerned with children in the age range of three to six years, which roughly corresponds to the preschool and kindergarten years. I use the term “preschool” here as a catchall, though an inadequate one, to describe all the settings where we find children between the approximate ages of three to five—i.e., excluding kindergartners—who are in the care of non-family members for some portion of the day during the majority of the year. (For licensing purposes, preschool technically starts at two years and nine months in some states, but we won’t quibble here.)
However, I use the more expansive terms “early childhood” or “young children” when I want to denote the range spanning the toddler years through age seven or eight. The boundaries needn’t be rigid, but the upper limit of this early childhood time frame demarcates the end of a cognitively and emotionally distinct period of development when children are, for the most part, still quite concrete in their thinking and actions. In schools, most American eight-year-olds are just beginning the gradual shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” that occurs in the older elementary years. Early childhood teacher licenses typically reflect these conceptual boundaries. For example, I am certified in the state of Massachusetts to teach children with and without disabilities from pre-K through second grade. Other states extend the early childhood period through third grade.
So, what do we mean by early education and care (EEC)? The difficulty of nomenclature reflects our patchwork system of settings and objectives in the United States, where we have a dizzying mix of privately and publicly funded and hybrid preschool environments, ranging from childcare centers or daycares (which have the dual mission of providing child care for parents while nurturing and educating children from birth to five); freestanding preschools (which offer more limited hours for preschool-aged children only, and are not a major source of child care) as well as publicly funded preschools (which are, confusingly, housed in a variety of settings, including public K–12 schools); and federally funded Head Start services, which include full-day and half-day programs (and which are also provided in multiple venues, including public schools and family daycares and in both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies). Local, state, and federal EEC dollars are interspersed throughout these programs, and one physical setting may have multiple funding streams for different types of family financial need and services. Needless to say, the pedagogic philosophies, practices, and salaries undergirding these programs vary widely. Unless I require a more precise definition, here I use the term “preschool” to describe this umbrella of experiences. I also use the word “teacher” as a blanket term, understanding that there are usually (but not always!) differences in salary and training between, for example, a certified teacher leading a pre-K classroom in the public school system and a family-based daycare provider who may have no background in early education at all. For lack of a better term, most parents refer to all individuals caring for their young children as teachers, and here I do the same.
If all of this sounds confusing, it’s because it is confusing. We have neither a coherent system nor a standard language to describe the early learning experiences of children in the United States, but it is my hope that we can nonetheless find common ground in our understanding of the diverse experiences of young children.