For my last column of the year, I want to touch on a less-discussed but not-unimportant question: what in the heck should we call the care and education of children during the first five years of their life?
Elliot’s Provocations
Elliot’s Provocations unpacks current events in the early learning world and explores how we can chart a path to a future where all children can flourish. Regarding the title, if you’re not steeped in early childhood education (ECE) lingo, a “provocation” is the field’s term—taken from the Reggio-Emilia philosophy of early education—for offering someone the opportunity to engage with an idea.
We hope this monthly column does that: provocations are certainly not answers, but we hope Elliot’s Provocations helps you pause and consider concepts in a different way.
Elliot’s Provocations: Bring on School-Aged Care
Can We Create a Seamless Melding of Early Child Care and School-Aged Care?
Linking early child care and school-aged care is a good idea both on the merits and the politics. I’m hardly the first one to point this out, but I want to highlight the opportunity here as we head into summer break and the acute headache it causes for many families.
America Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Child Care
Child care is finally getting widespread attention, but we have yet to answer the essential questions: what is child care and who is it for?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect child care to be a major flashpoint in the 2024 election cycle. There are...
Last year, I wrote a column on five trends to look for in 2023 (which I think in retrospect were mostly apt, though the answer to ‘is bipartisanship possible’ seems to have been ‘outlook not so good’), and thought it would be worthwhile to do it again as the calendar gets ready to turn.
If you’ve been following my work for the past year, you know I am deeply concerned about how unprepared our child- and family-serving systems are for this new reality. I’m not the only one. A new report puts a fine point on why early care & education stakeholders need to have a climate strategy, and why public officials need to have ECE in their climate strategy: a staggering number of child care programs are under threat.
The child care movement needs a broad base of support in order to win an effective, publicly-funded system. Now, a new research paper is opening another door by showing how child care is impacting that most respected of American icons: farmers.
Happy New Year! As 2023 kicks off, I wanted to highlight five early learning trends to be watching this year.
Some companies are responding to the child care crisis in a somewhat predictable way: they’re looking after their own. Stories have been emerging about a proliferation of on-site child care programs; an NPR article a few weeks ago noted that
If you’ve been following my work at all, you know I bristle at many “incremental” solutions to child care challenges.
In our talk of care, we frequently focus on questions of where, who and what. We rarely ask questions of why we care and what it means to care. Similarly, much of the modern care conversation centers around (very real!) struggles and scarcity. That’s why I was so pleased to read journalist Elissa Strauss’ new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.
There is a concept, variously used in science and business, known as the “valley of death.” In essence, this is the dangerous period between research & development and on-the-ground adoption where many ideas and ventures fail.
Back in May, I had the privilege to present the closing keynote address at the Child Care Services Association annual conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. One point that several attendees told me resonated was when I showed that you can make many different arguments for child care, although advocates tend to focus primarily on only a few.
