No one, I think, is claiming that raising well-adjusted children is an easy task. Speaking as a grandparent and as a former director of a childcare program, I’d suggest that you need a healthy measure of dumb luck.
Prayer probably doesn’t hurt.
The State of Colorado wants to help, however. And if you have a child who will be qualified to enter kindergarten in September 2024, you can apply for a subsidized spot in the new Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) program, starting in September 2023.
With luck, your child will be placed in your top-choice childcare program. Or maybe, in your second-choice program. (A computer at the Colorado Department of Early Childhood office makes the determination.)
Luck does seem to play a role.
As I mentioned yesterday, three Pagosa childcare centers currently appear on the CDEC website as participating UPK sites.
Pagosa Springs Head Start (open 8am – 3pm)
Seeds of Learning (open 7:30am – 5:30pm)
Wings Early Childhood Center (open 7:30am – 5:30pm)
All three centers are advertising ‘Financial assistance options available’.
I shared, yesterday, very brief quotes from the Head Start and Seeds of Learning websites. Both centers appear to have programs based around ‘preparing children to succeed in school’.
I can’t say that Wings Early Childhood Center is any different. But I did find this statement on their website:
Our vision is to promote learning through play and natural discovery. As educators, we support children through their early years, giving them the wings to fly.
Does a child develop differently in an environment based on ‘play’… compared to an environment based on ‘school success’?
We understand what educators generally mean when they talk about ‘succeeding in school’. Ultimately, they are talking about successful high school graduation and — with luck and a willingness to accrue massive student debt — college graduation as well.
In other words, a successful journey through the academic pipeline.
What doesn’t often get discussed — when people discuss early childhood — is what happens to preschool children who are inserted into that academic pipeline at age 4 or 5 years, and are taught through that process, that rewards come from pleasing adult teachers… and that natural, childish ‘play’ is unimportant, but simply tolerated.
So I will take on the challenge of discussing ‘play’ as an element of childhood.
Certain scientific studies have claimed that a child exposed to academic training at a young age, in a childcare setting, will ultimately do better in school, will get a better job, and will be less likely to enter the school-to-prison pipeline. (There are several pipelines a child can enter.)
We also have experts who believe ‘play’ is an important childhood activity.
The American Academy of Pediatricians has a web page that summarizes the importance of ‘play’ in early childhood. They note, for example:
Play enables social skills such as listening… paying attention, resolving conflict, and negotiating relationships. Play and stress are closely linked. High amounts of play are associated with low levels of cortisol. Play, when supported by nurturing caregivers, may affect brain functions by buffering adversity and reducing toxic stress.
That’s some strong language. ‘Buffering adversity’. ‘Reducing toxic stress’. ‘Resolving conflicts’.
Other researchers would use even stronger language.
Here are a few quotes from Dr. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play.
Educators, parents and policy makers should all be concerned at the rapid decline in unsupervised free play for children, which may damage early child development and later social and emotional learning, according to research.
Sustained, moderate-to-severe play deprivation during the first 10 years of life appears to be linked to poor early child development, later leading to depression, difficulty adapting to change, poorer self-control, and a greater tendency to addiction as well as fragile and shallower interpersonal relationships.
Play deprivation in childhood has come up in numerous interviews that I have conducted with some of America’s most violent criminals…
…Severely play-deprived children will tend to engage in automatic and repetitive activities, failing to engage socially. In later childhood, the play-deprived child may have more explosive reactions to circumstances rather than a sense of belonging. As adults, they are often pessimistic and subject to smoldering depression due to a lack of joy in their lives. They tend to be more ideologically fixed and certain with little ambiguity in their social worlds…
I’m curious about that paragraph, because we seem to suffering — here in America — from an abundance of ideologically fixed, pessimistic, depressed, explosively reactive young people who are walking into school buildings, heavily armed, and murdering teachers and students.
School buildings, folks. School buildings.
Is anyone making a connection, here, between school violence… and the lack of opportunities for self-organized childhood play in a modern society that puts so much stress on ‘success in school’?
Dr. Brown:
Is there a play crisis? We should certainly be alert to the possibility. Numerous influences are currently diminishing access to self-organized childhood play.
We do not know the outcome of these many influences…