Early Childhood Workforce Index

The existing early care and education (ECE) system does a disservice to the educators — largely women and often women of color — who nurture and facilitate learning for millions of the nation's youngest children every day. Despite their important, complex labor, early educators' working conditions undermine their wellbeing and create devastating financial insecurity well into retirement age. These conditions also jeopardize their ability to work effectively with children. As we find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic, child care has been hailed as essential, yet policy responses to COVID-19 have mostly ignored educators themselves, leaving most to choose between their livelihood and their health. Unlike public schools, when child care programs close, there's no guarantee that early educators will continue to be paid. Even as many providers try to keep their doors open to ensure their financial security, the combination of higher costs to meet safety protocols and lower revenue from fewer children enrolled is leading to job losses and program closures. Many of these closures and lost jobs are expected to become permanent. Over the course of the first eight months of the pandemic, 166,000 jobs in the child care industry were lost. As of October 2020, the industry was only 83 percent as large as it was in February, before the pandemic began.

Ethnic-Racial Socialization in Early Childhood: The Implications of Color-Consciousness and Colorblindness for Prejudice Development

This chapter outlines how early childhood teachers can bring children into conversations surrounding race and racism by drawing on literature on how parents of color discuss these topics. Although educators’ practices surrounding race and racism remain largely unexplored, decades of developmental psychological research indicate that parents of color engage in ethnic-racial socialization practices that are beneficial for children (Hughes et al., 2006). The established dimensions of parental ethnic-racial socialization include (1) cultural socialization, or teaching children about their ethnic heritage and instilling ethnic pride; (2) preparation for bias, or teaching children about racism and preparing them to face discrimination; (3) promotion of mistrust, or warning children about the need to distance themselves from other racial groups; and (4) egalitarianism, or emphasizing the similarities between and equality of all races (Hughes et al. 2006). One consideration to take into account from a developmental perspective is that children’s level of cognitive development impacts how they interpret messages about race. This chapter draws a link between parental ethnic-racial socialization and extends this body of work to school settings, with a focus on teachers. The ideologies of colorblindness and color-consciousness are discussed throughout

Stability in center day care: Relations with children's well-being and problem behavior in day care

Mothers and primary professional caregivers of 186 children, aged 6-30 months, participated in this study in which a new measure for daily stability in center day care was developed, describing staffing, grouping, and program features. Relative contributions of infants' daily experiences of care stability, quality of care, and mother's daily stress to the child's adjustment to day care were analyzed with hierarchical regressions. The child's adjustment was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach, 1997) and with the Leiden Inventory for the Child's Well-being in Day Care. Children enrolled in fewer care arrangements showed less internalizing behavior and more well-being in the day care setting. Children had higher well-being scores when trusted caregivers were more available. Mother's family management stress was related to more internalizing problem behavior. Interactions between mother's daily stress and stability in care were found to affect the child's adjustment to day care