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Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Symbolic Play: The Development of Social Understanding describes the development of symbolic play from infancy through the preschool years. This text is divided into 12 chapters that focus on make-believe as an activity within which young children spontaneously represent and practice their understanding of the social world. The first chapter introduces the development of event schemata produced in symbolic play, about children's management of the playframe, and about the development of subjunctive, or "what if" thought. The next chapters are devoted to the development of joint pretending, specifically the use if shared scripts in the organization of make-believe play and the subtleties of metacommunication. These chapters also emphasize the supporting role of the mother in early collaborative make-believe. These topics are followed by discussions of the child's growing ability to represent the internal states of the inanimate figures whose doing can vicariously enacts. The remaining chapters focus on social interaction through symbolic play with dolls, toy animals, object props, and language. This book will prove useful to psychologists and researchers in the fields of human development, society, and family.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

This open access book develops a theoretical concept of teaching that is relevant to early childhood education, and based on children’s learning and development through play. It discusses theoretical premises and research on playing and learning, and proposes the development of play-responsive didaktik. It examines the processes and products of learning and development, teaching and its phylogenetic and ontogenetic development, as well as the ‘what’ of learning and didaktik. Next, it explores the actions, objects and meaning of play and provides insight into the diversity of beliefs about the practices of play. The book presents ideas on how combined research and development projects can be carried out, providing incentive and a model for practice development and research. The second part of the book consists of empirical studies on teacher’s playing skills and examples of play with very young as well as older children.