February 2022

By Jackie Spinner, Photo: iStock, The Washington Post, February 10, 2022 For the first time in decades, the nation’s top pediatricians have changed the checklist of developmental milestones for infants and young children to make it easier to identify delays that could be a sign of autism or other social-communication disabilities. The updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made with the American Academy of Pediatrics, raised the percentage of children who typically meet...

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Help advance the field by sharing your unique experience. ZERO TO THREE’s Virtual Conference is the go-to event for professionals from across the early childhood field seeking to advance their knowledge and practice. The conference’s range of online learning experiences is designed to offer the very latest research, promising practices, and policy strategies. Proposals will be considered for presentations ranging from 10–75 minutes featuring content relevant to...

By Maxwell Adler, Photo: Bryan Banducci/Bloomberg, Bloomberg City Lab, February 10, 2022 A man in a Superman costume and a child on a tricked-out tricycle, affectionately nicknamed “trek-ceratops,” stood out among the pack of cyclists riding right down the middle of JFK Drive in San Francisco on their way to school. Two parents sped ahead to the intersection at the corner of 11th and Mission to block off traffic. No police escort was present. And music blasted from the speakers on...

By The HOPE Team, 2/15/22, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Dr. Wendy Ellis , joins HOPE’s Director of Training and Technical Assistance, Amanda Winn, for the second vlog in our new series, HOPE Block by Block. This series highlights the work of Black practitioners, scholars, researchers, and community activists during the month of February. In this second episode, Dr. Ellis will address the HOPE building block of environment. The environment building block is about children...

By Lisa A. Gennetian, Christina Gibson-Davis, and Lisa A. Keister, Image: from study, EconoFact, January 20, 2022 The Issue: Research and policies aimed at addressing poverty tend to focus on family income. Yet, the future financial resilience of U.S. households with children will be shaped not only by the income they earn but also by their wealth holdings. Wealth is a critical resource that enables households to deal with unexpected economic shocks — including recent experiences of job loss...

By Annie Gowen, Photo: Maddie McGarvey/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, February 9, 2022 Dozens of suburban moms from around the country dialed into an Ohio-based Zoom training session last month with the same goal — to learn how to combat the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric from parents whose protests over mask mandates and diversity education have turned school board meeting rooms into battlegrounds. The lessons: Show up at meetings with fact-based speeches ready and create text...

The October 19-21, 2022 biennial Together for Families Conference is a unique virtual event that connects various stakeholders from across the U.S. and Canada in the Family Support and Strengthening Field to focus on best and promising practice for supporting families’ advancement. This conference, co-hosted by key national organizations in the field, is designed for practitioners at the program, systems, and funder levels, it will provide valuable opportunities to learn from expert...

By Anya Kamenetz, Illustration: L.A. Johnson/NPR, National Public Radio, February 10, 2022 Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century. Yet her most recent scientific publication has made her question everything she thought she knew. "It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this." And by "this," she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than...

By Britt Cannon, Illustration: Neto Junior, Collider, February 12, 2022 Disney is no stranger to exploring some heavier aspects of life. Many of their releases from the last couple of decades have reputations for being tear-jerkers. More recently, films like Tangled , Inside Out , and Soul unpack emotional abuse, gaslighting, trauma, and even consciousness and death. Encanto is another incredible addition to a long line of animated features that carry a deeper message. Encanto is receiving...

PACEs Connection is helping to get the world out about this, 17th year of Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) Day. See below for instructions on downloading, coloring, and entering your sheet in the coloring contest, and you may win a bag of RAK swag! On #RandomActsOfKindnessDay, (February 17, 2022), five random entries will be selected to receive a RAK #MakeKindnessTheNorm Swag bag. Visit https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/ to download a coloring sheet and instructions now!

This article from Mental Health America discusses common stressors faced by single parents. Single-parent families are increasingly common in the United States – some start that way, while others come about after divorce, death, or incarceration. Sometimes one parent’s job requires them to travel often or for extended periods, making their partner effectively a single parent at times. There are many types of single-parent families, headed by a biological parent, grandparent, foster or...

By Pam Jarvis, Photo: Runar Pederson Holkestad/Creative Commons, Yorkshire Bylines, January 30, 2022 As time goes by we see more and more initiatives funnelled into education to ‘close the gap’ between children who live in families with incomes that place them into the ‘disadvantaged’ category. Yet again and again we find that very modest returns leave politicians disappointed. Instead, we should be looking at the environments that children inhabit before they even enter the school gates.