This book is the essential guide to understanding the historical influences that have shaped our ideas about infancy and infant care today. It introduces the key theories, themes, and concepts that have shaped the history of infant care and invites readers to explore how events, approaches, traditions, studies and stories have shaped modern day practice. From foundlings to wetnurses, community care and edu-carers, it introduces topics about family life, professional roles, and educational settings. The book includes short vignettes, imagery, and case studies as well as extended reflective questions. Each chapter introduces a different topic including pregnancy, parental relationships, developmental studies, the role of the professional and community services available to infants.

This book explains the differences between European countries in the supply and forms of public child care and preschool provisions by reference to the historical context in which these forms originated and to the institutional constraints underlying their development.

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.

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.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

Drawing heavily on infancy research conducted over the past 25 years, Fogel provides a scientifically based account of infant development. Chronologically organized, the text covers similar topics in each chapter, including motor and physical development, perceptual and cognitive development, and social and language development. Fogel also stresses the practical applications of the theories and research presented through in-text features including Family and Society, Co-regulating with Baby, and Awareness Through Movement. A new Web icon identifies topics that can be augmented by searching the World Wide Web.

This monograph focuses on early forms of preschool care and education, the professions and children in the 1920s and 1930s, the federal role in a series of crisis interventions, and social and intellectual changes affecting early education in the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of a two-tier system for care and education of the preschool child is addressed first. On one hand, a nursery school and kindergarten system for middle-income children developed into one whose primary focus was to supplement enrichment available at home. These nursery schools and kindergartens were held together as a system by their aim of educating and socializing the growing child. On the other hand, a childminding or day care system for low-income children developed in response to the necessity of maternal employment outside the home. The report examines consequences of the stratified system of preschool care and education for poor children and their families. The most important of these was the stigmatization of child care as a function of social welfare. It is concluded that various "suitable home" eligibility requirements established for applicants of social welfare benefits have caused minorities (especially blacks) to be consistently excluded from the system. Over 100 references are cited. (RH)