This story is part of a series that looks at what makes the 2-year-old year so critical and what could be done to better support toddlers in America. The series was produced by The Hechinger Report and Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project, nonprofit news organizations focused on education coverage, in partnership with Slate Magazine. Sign up for our newsletter. Or view the whole series.
In Wichita, Kansas, single mother Tiffany McNitt sometimes cries after dropping her kids, aged 2 and 3, at their babysitter’s house on her way to work. It’s not just that she’ll miss them—she worries her children aren’t learning anything and are already falling behind.
In Seattle, Tori Gottlieb and her husband agonized over spending 25 percent of their income on day care for their 2-year-old daughter last fall. They didn’t see how they could afford to have the second child they knew they wanted.
Parents dread the terrible twos, but what makes the year so tough for many families isn’t just tantrums in supermarket aisles or toilet-training disasters. It’s the difficulty of finding safe, high-quality child care in a country that offers parents limited choices of questionable quality and little guidance on how to make those choices. This neglect could have far-reaching consequences—research shows that a toddler’s daily environment can have a lasting effect on her brain structure for a lifetime.
[For more on this story by LILLIAN MONGEAU, go to http://hechingerreport.org/imp...-2-year-olds-better/]
Photo: Educare Arizona classmates Nathan Jaramillo, far left, Esteban Cuevas and Melissa Gordillo “read” books during free time in their toddler classroom. Children begin learning basic literacy skills, like which direction to turn the pages, around age 2. Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report Photo: Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report
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