A New Vision for Early Childhood: Rethinking Our Relationships with Young Children

This innovative and thought-provoking book invites you to take a new look at your relationships with young children, reconsidering how toddlers' agency can be nurtured inside relational dynamics of cooperation and compromise in support of everyone's well-being. The book presents ethnographic findings on the culture and needs of toddlers through a close look at the behaviors and situational context of two-year-old Emily. Through this example, the author offers observations of common social practices in early childhood contexts, including how adults implement age-based segregation, practice over-infantilization, and excessively manage the time and bodies of very young people. Inviting self-reflection and inquiry into the limitations of some of the frameworks we live and work within, the book details action strategies for shifting adult-child relationships from hierarchal structures centered in power and control into reciprocal structures centered in cooperation and trust. Moving these ideas from research and theory back into preschool and classrooms, A New Vision for Early Childhood is important reading for any preschool teacher, leader, or parent who wants to be supported in honoring the agency of their children, taking care to know them more than change them.