Are Kids More Complicated?

A recent article I wrote about trainer qualifications generated lots of Facebook postings and emails. Many who contacted me were also concerned about changing requirements for child care staff as well—primarily the push to require staff with degrees in early learning. A sample of what they had to say:

·         Nancy, a center director in Missouri, wrote, “…some of the best childcare workers and teachers are those compassionate and caring people who have never set foot in a college classroom. There are some people who are naturals and just know how to care for children. And most of the time they are open to new ideas and ways of doing things. We are working on our NAEYC accreditation and they are making a push for childcare providers and teachers to have more education and letters behind their names. I feel sad that eventually some of my best teachers will be out of a job because they don’t have degrees. And I have known people with master’s degrees in education that can quote every theory and philosophy out there about education but I wouldn’t want them near children.”

·         Andrea, a Program Director in Vermont, wrote, “The new standards being implemented by NAEYC and state licensing regulations are excluding some of the most dedicated, naturally talented, loving providers in our field. It is shameful, and an enormous loss to kids and families.”

·         Anne, a Director in Massachusetts, shared, “I have quite a few ‘older’ teachers who may not have the college courses being required to meet both state and NAEYC requirements being thrust upon us, but I would rather have them over newly degreed bachelor students teaching my young children. They have the ‘true knowledge’ of understanding what children really need to thrive, and give them the individual attention they need, while newly degreed teachers are full of book learning but no hands-on, real-life experience.”

This all left me wondering why some people think a degree in early learning is needed to work with small children. Have children recently become more complicated? Have their basic needs changed? Have their busy brains had some software update to Human 2.0 that I missed? Has the world grown so complicated that four years of expensive and specialized schooling is now necessary for adults who want to help little people engage it?

Not according to brain scientists. What the last few decades of neurological research has shown us about raising kids is, according to Dr. Steve Petersen, James S. McDonnell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Washington University Medical School, “Don't raise your children in a closet, starve them, or hit them in the head with a frying pan.” Doesn’t take much specialized education to check those boxes, now does it?

Dr. John Medina writes in his new book Brain Rules for Baby, “We survived because enough of us became parents good enough to shepherd our pooping, peeing, swearing, breathtakingly vulnerable offspring into adulthood.” It appears that “good enough” caregiving is...well... good enough for survival.

Yet, we have done much more than survive. In 2002, the Population Reference Bureau estimated that nearly 106,500,000,000 humans have been born in the last 50,000 years, and our ancestral pathway twists and turns back much further. It took something like 4000 million years for us to evolve from the first organic molecules into Homo sapiens.  We are the product of millions of generations of convoluted, meandering, messy evolution. Our communal past is full of sickness, ice-ages, saber tooth tigers, food shortages and other challenges great and small, but few of our ancestors spent their first 5 years of life under the care of someone with a degree in early childhood education. In fact, through most of human history young children have spent their days and nights in the care of other children.

No research I have seen--or heard about…or touched…or had any sensory contact with—support the notion that college degrees are necessary to successfully prepare young children for the world. On the contrary, hard science and squishy anecdotal evidence indicate that parents and caregivers need simply be “good enough” to keep kids safe and respond to their basic physical and emotional needs, a standard that has worked out pretty well for the human species.

Where does this push to have all caregivers clutching an early learning degree come from?

There has been some solid research showing a strong correlation between caregiver training/formal education and program quality. It’s my belief that this research has morphed into the current push for degreed staff.

The problem is that the research shows a correlative relationship between caregiver education and program quality and not a causative relationship. I’ve seen no research that shows simply having degreed staff causes higher quality child care. Teasing out hard facts relating to the interplay of multidimensional human interactions is slow and tedious business. I’ve yet to see a universally agreed upon definition of quality in relation to early learning programs, let alone consensus on creating quality.

I believe policy making is getting ahead of the science—as it did over a decade ago with the now debunked Mozart Effect (another Mozart link). Back then some misinterpreted research led to the sale of lots of classical music, the governors of Tennessee and Georgia sending a Mozart CD to every baby born in their states,  and Florida's legislature mandating classical music be played daily in state-funded early learning programs.

Drawing mistaken conclusions from research happens all the time. Recently, I read this article and wondered if the last line (“This suggests that a more settled family life and access to more expensive equipment had the biggest impact on children’s education”) was really what the researcher found. So, I emailed her and asked. She was kind enough to send me a copy of her report with the simple statement, “I can assure you my research did not draw this conclusion.”

Research is slowly untangling the complicated issues surrounding early learning, but the findings often lead to more interesting questions than to definitive answers. Moreover, because there are more ethical dilemmas associated with research on children than research on fungus or tapeworms, it is harder to do randomized double-blind studies. We can’t ship off one group of infants to be raised in isolation by chimpanzees and another to be raised in isolation by early learning degree holders and then check back in 20 years for the results.

Now, we have good intentioned advocates pushing for incredibly expensive policy changes that are based on scant hard science. I think we need to slow down this push for degrees until the science is more conclusive. Remember, it was not too long ago that the early learning experts were telling us that formula was better than breast milk and that cuddling babies was a bad idea.

That said, I think we should do everything we can assure that all child care staff have access to as much training as they want. I also think we should encourage them to be skeptical about the latest early learning fads that pop up in the press or filter into the early learning literature.

Then again, what do I know, I could have been hit in the head with a frying pan when I was little.