Child Care Is Education … and More

We know that children’s language and cognitive skills thrive in quality child care programs, with responsive caregivers who are adequately trained and supported.

In poor quality programs, opportunities to stimulate development are lost or squandered. In large groups with few trained staff, in centers and homes where children have few opportunities to be read to, to be listened to, to be held, in programs where television or isolation replace human interaction and communication, children learn that they have little affect on their environment — precisely the wrong message to promote readiness and school success.

Traditionally, three “places” have been seen to affect a child’s education: family, school and community. Child care is part of all three.

• Child care is a family support.

  Not only is child care often provided by relatives and other family members, but from the perspective of the child as well as the family, child care is often an extension of the home. Child care provides many opportunities to help parents succeed as “first teachers.”

• For young children, child care is school.

  Just listen to any group of 3- and 4-year-olds talking about “my teacher.” They have demystified the dichotomy that has fractured the early childhood field for so long. They know it is not child care and education – child care is education. Research clearly tells us that early experiences matter. It doesn’t matter where it happens or what the building is called, what matters is what happens once the children arrive.

• Child care is community.

  More recently, we have come to appreciate the importance of the community to child development — both the climate in a community and the services provided. Child care is an important part of the community. For school-age children, child care is the “new neighborhood,” whether sponsored by schools or by any of a wide-range of community-based organizations.

People are often reluctant to talk about child care as education. We worry that the term education is too limiting.

We believe that somehow child care is more than education — that it is child development, that it includes health, that it should be supportive of families and their working schedules. These beliefs are not part of the traditional purpose of education, although this too is changing. Also, since child care includes babies and toddlers, traditional education terms don’t seem to fit.

Despite these concerns, if we are to improve child care, it must be seen as a service for children as well as their parents — it must be seen as education and more.

We must step up efforts to ensure that funding is provided to improve the quality of those places where children go before they enter school or at the end of the school day. That means providing some funds directly to child care programs to improve their educational services — funding for accreditation, teacher training, and increased compensation.

Improving child care also means enhancing family child care networks, providing home visiting and literacy programs to kith-and-kin providers as well as parents, and ensuring that care that goes on after school is connected programmatically to what goes on during the school day.

We must also keep up our efforts to bring health resources into child care — particularly health consultants who can help ensure health and safety as well as health promotion. Education for young children begins with health, and these linkages must continue into adolescence.

Additional state, federal, and private funds are needed to ensure more improvements and make child care more affordable for more families.

This is the time to take every available opportunity — from the classroom and the living room to the hearing room and the board room — to bring these efforts together in order to provide safe healthy learning environments.

Parents should be encouraged to join in this effort. We have to send a message to decision-makers that while parents work, we must make sure that child care works for children.