How a New Approach to Early Childhood Could Avert a ‘Public Policy Catastrophe’

EdSurge recently had a chance to speak with Wuori, a longtime early childhood policy expert and former kindergarten teacher and school district administrator, about the book, which was published Sept. 27.

The following conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: Can you start by explaining what “the daycare myth” is — and why semantics are so important to this conversation?

Dan Wuori: We talk about how we’re in this crisis or that crisis — there’s an access crisis, there’s a compensation crisis, there’s an affordability crisis [in early childhood education]. But looking out at the landscape, I really feel that at the heart of all of this is just a crisis of understanding. We have, for the better part of a century now, allowed this idea to take hold that our young children simply require care and that it’s the slightly older children that get involved in learning and education.

“The Daycare Myth” title really refers to that sort of conceptualization — that what young children need is just sort of custodial caretaking while older children are learning. And the reason for that is we know better than ever that not only are children learning from day one, but increasingly we’re uncovering ways in which they may begin learning in utero. There are these important kinds of early forms of language learning. For example, infants are not only recognizing the tone of their mother’s own voice but beginning to sort of structure their cognition around the rhythms and the patterns of their mother’s native language as evidenced just hours after their birth.

That’s a very different proposition from, ‘I need someplace to just keep my baby safe and warm while I go to work.’ And so the underlying message of the book, I think, for parents is that these are environments that have to be chosen very thoughtfully and choices that have to be made with real consideration. Because you’re not selecting a babysitter, you are selecting the adults who will help co-construct your child’s brain. And that’s very different from, ‘Is this someone who can help to change diapers and make sure their physical safety is ensured for eight hours while I’m at work?’

Relatedly, one of the points you make in the book is the idea that learning begins in kindergarten is baseless. Where did that misconception come from? And why, in spite of the decades of brain science we now have, is it still so deeply held?

It’s a great question. I mean, the only thing I can point to there is just sort of the history of our K-12 system. Not terribly long ago, even kindergarten wasn’t a part of many public education systems. Children would begin school in the first grade. And so it is a beginning, I guess, of our public education system. But the idea that we need to build our policy around the idea that we hope that children will come to kindergarten ‘ready to learn,’ as if kindergarten is where learning actually begins, is really contradicted by decades of brain science at this point.

In the book you also point out that, you know, inertia is powerful.

No question. And even though I don’t want to allow this to be used as a cop out, we’ve had good indications of the brain science now for decades, but some of what I think we’re learning even about this learning in utero is still very much emerging. And so our systems were created, in many cases, before the science was well entrenched. Changing it potentially is costly and a big change to the structure. And so I definitely agree that inertia is part of the equation here.

It’s been said that this issue doesn’t have great political valence because families only experience the acute hardships of our broken early childhood system for a handful of years. It’s painful, but it’s temporary. Do you think that’s an accurate assessment? Why do you think that isn’t enough to create change?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I find it puzzling. Yes, you’re right, that for families that have a single child, maybe it’s a four- to five-year proposition, but I can tell you in my household, with two young children decades ago, for more than 10 years we paid more for child care than we paid for our mortgage each month. I think it ought to create more single-issue voters around this topic, as difficult as it is.

Here, we’ve got a majority of the country who are paying more for infant care than for in-state college tuition at this point. When you think about having a baby, one of the first things that you’re advised is to begin a college savings account, because it’s so costly that even 17 years worth of savings for many families doesn’t come close to covering the cost of higher education. And yet we spend very little time talking about the fact that really all families with young children incur that cost instantly, whether it’s a cost literally out of pocket to an early childhood program or whether it’s an opportunity cost potentially for a parent who is going to stay home and lose that income. But no question, it’s very costly to be the parent of a newborn and up.

You argue that, like the food pyramid of the early ’90s, our early childhood system needs to be, literally, flipped on its head. Can you describe what an inverted system would look like? And if it’s accessible, what does an existing one look like in the U.S.?

Yeah, so I use the example of the food pyramid of the early ’90s to frame up the case that we have, in the past, had widely accepted public policy that in hindsight has turned out to look foolish, that the recommendations of the food pyramid from the early ’90s are such that no credible nutritionist would suggest in the year 2024 that the way to manage your weight is six to 11 servings of pasta a day. And so I use that just as sort of a framing device in the opening of the book to ask the question around, ‘What else are we getting really boldly and catastrophically wrong?’ And in my estimation, our nation’s approach to young children and families — and also very much to the professionals who serve them — is the same sort of public policy catastrophe.

In fact, I think I say in the book, if you were challenged to create some diabolical plan that would be counter to what we know about the science of early development, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a system that is worse than the one that parents have to navigate every day.

During the most critical weeks and months needed for secure attachment, for example, 1 in 4 mothers has to return to the workforce within two weeks [of giving birth]. We’ve got early childhood professionals who are literally charged with building the brains of young children who make not only less, but in some cases substantially less, than what we pay people to hand french fries through a window. We have a system that is balanced on the backs of low-income women, primarily women of color, who are literally subsidizing the affordability of child care for millions of American families.

The consequence, I guess, to taxpayers is that each and every one of us — whether we have a young child in our lives currently, whether our own children, our grandchild, or if you don’t have young children at this stage in your life — every taxpayer in this country is paying for the results of our failure to get things right in the first place.

So in the book, I sort of suggest that in the same way that the food pyramid was inverted subsequently in 2008, that we really need to rethink how we are approaching policy for kids. And I think the base of that new pyramid is a widespread understanding that this is the single most critical period in all of human development, that we’re respecting families’ needs and choices during this time, that we are compensating the people who work in this field at a professional level commensurate with the responsibility that they actually have, and that ultimately this is an opportunity for decades.

Our two major political parties have gone back and forth about the size of government. And to me this is a slam dunk case for how we shrink the size of government. So much of that back-and-forth, historically, has revolved around making these drastic cuts to services that people need, and there’s a second path here, which is just to get things right in a way that mitigates against all of these costly services later in life that improves health outcomes, that improves education outcomes, that improves the number of interactions that we have with the criminal justice system.

So I definitely think we need to invert our policy. And I do think that there are some encouraging signs. To your question about, are there states or examples? No question. New Mexico and Vermont have gone very far here in the past couple of years toward making child care much more affordable and accessible, not just for our most low-income families, but really for the bulk of the population of those states. I don’t think they have it all figured out, but compared to the rest of the nation, I think they are absolutely models.

One starting point you mention, for how to create a system that better supports all families, is paid parental leave. Can you walk me through how paid parental leave can help to establish a strong foundation for families, and especially for developing babies?

Among the most important developmental outcomes, really, of the first 12 months of life is attachment, right? And so what we aspire to is a secure attachment between infants and their loving adult caregivers that demonstrates that these are adults who are reliable and that the world is safe. And this attachment that is formed between infants and their primary caregivers during the earliest months of life goes on to undergird our long-term mental health. To me, that alone is a really compelling case for why we ought to be looking at more robust family leave policies.

The other piece of that equation is all of this learning. Obviously language learning is a big, big outcome of the first 12 months, the motor development, all of these things. Young children have very specific needs, and chief among them is these stable, nurturing relationships with really highly engaged adults. So the book stays a little bit agnostic as to how that happens, but really makes the case to parents that whether this is happening exclusively in your home or in combination with an out-of-home early childhood provider, that young children need these high-quality interactions for the development of the major neural pathways in the brain. And so the choice of an early childhood setting or the choice to have some extra time that you’re staying home with that newborn is terrifically important.

You highlight a number of promising practices in the states near the end of the book (several of which have been featured in EdSurge). Do those changes make you hopeful about the future of early childhood in this country, or how do you see these local- and state-level policy changes as fitting into the bigger picture?

Yeah, I’d say a couple of things. I think of the book as sort of, in terms of where we go next, laying out two big cases. The first and unquestionably the most important is that we need transformative public investment in children and families. And the good news is we truly are already paying for the system that we need. We’re just doing it in all the wrong ways. We seem content to be paying for incarceration and worse health outcomes and greater reliance on social services, for example, in adulthood, than making a more tactical investment in getting kids off on the right foot. So I want to talk about the states, but I also don’t think that what the states are doing is enough. I think for us to have an equitable country, an equitable set of policies for young children, this is something that ought to be taken on at the federal level, so that whether you’re raising a young child in Texas or Idaho or Vermont, you’ve got access to some of the same sorts of services.

So I feel really strongly that this is a job for Congress to take on at the federal level. It is frustrating, in recent years, to see in a divided Congress so little get done. And I also have worked enough with elected leaders and understand the process well enough to know that really transformative changes in our system don’t happen quickly. They don’t typically happen kind of all in one fell swoop. So I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to say we need this transformative federal approach.

That said, I’m very optimistic. I mean, one of the great lessons of the past six or so years now that I’ve been really focused on work with state policymakers around the country is just how much bipartisanship there is around this issue. It’s easy to look at Congress and think, ‘Oh gosh, our politics is so dysfunctional.’ But at the state level, it is thrilling to me to see such strong leadership from the reddest of the red states and the bluest of the blue and everywhere in between. This is an issue that voters overwhelmingly agree on. And my hope has been, in writing the book, that the book was bipartisan to an extent that no matter who you are, that you can pick this book up and find a thread that sort of resonates with your political philosophy. If you’re an economic fiscal conservative, then there’s a case for you to be made in this book. If you’re a social conservative interested in the strength of the nuclear family, then there’s a case to be made here. So I think all of that is important.

The innovations at the state level, though, I think are awfully important. One, in the short term, in the absence of action by Congress, I think it’s great that the states are moving some of these things forward, but they also can be laboratories for demonstrating what works. And so I’m definitely encouraged there, but maybe more than anything just encouraged that this is happening across the political spectrum.