The Importance of Being Little Quotes

“Indeed, playing games and laughing together are far more educational than drilling kids on their ABCs on the way to daycare.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Pretending is an essential language of childhood.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Early learning is fundamentally social in nature.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school . . . ? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment.

Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that:

“The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.”

For our young children, what else is there to wish for?”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Young children are for the most part just and moral. They love preachy stories because they do in fact understand that actions have consequences. Yet they turn to adults for the mercy and subtlety that they themselves can’t yet summon. And who can blame them? They are still little and vulnerable, uncompromising to a fault. . . . they want an adult’s protection from their own rough justice. This, I think, is the one true story of early childhood, the yin and yang of being a small person.

It’s confusing emotional terrain for children to inhabit, and we must guide them gently through it. Is it intimacy you want, or freedom? Protection or power? Childhood is a kind of enslavement, but it’s a liberation, too. Young children’s emotions are all about this basic conflict. Feed me. Hold me. Comfort me. Fix me. I hate you! I can do it myself.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Children are intuitive scientists and armchair philosophers, brimming with such startling observations that it’s hard to believe they’ve come from people barely out of diapers. . . . But, along with their Talmudic wisdom and intellectual acuity, preschoolers can surprise, equally, with their undeveloped motor skills, atrocious impulse control, and venal self-interest. Like teenagers, whom they closely resemble developmentally, preschoolers are a complicated mix of competence and ineptitude. The problem with American early education is how often the grownups misread, and even interchange, those two attributes completely, and at such critical moments for learning.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“why should we settle for unimaginative goals (as we find in so many early education settings) like being able to identify triangles and squares, or recalling the names of colors and seasons? Recognizing visual symbols is something a dog can do. Surely we can aim higher than those picayune objectives and demand preschool classrooms based on a more advanced understanding of developmental processes, an understanding that is bounded only by the limits of a young child’s growing brain, not by a superintendent’s checklist of what needs to be covered before June rolls around.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“anger is not only a natural by-product of learning (as we see when children become frustrated by difficult tasks) but, more important, an “essential energy for learning” that helps children acquire mastery of skills such as curiosity and persistence. Given how much learning occurs in the preschool years, she says, “it’s not surprising that there is a normal upsurge in aggressive energy during this stage of development.”1 These opportunities to understand and guide children’s natural emotions shouldn’t be squandered, even the challenging ones. They are crucial for healthy cognitive, and social and emotional, growth.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“trend that should send alarm bells ringing nationwide. In fact, the number of hours of sleep a person actually gets has a social, as well as biological, component, and one study found that Dutch babies slept two hours more per night than American babies.32 I wish the parents of those American babies understood that many of the classic behavioral challenges seemingly endemic to American children, such as whining and tantrums as well as more significant acting out, are at the least highly associated with, and probably even caused by, sleep deprivation.33”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“The easy—American—solution is this: we need to pay teachers more so that we can attract the best candidates to the job; and we need to do a better job supporting them and helping them to improve once they become teachers so they don’t leave for greener pastures.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“I believe I grew up to be a reader because books were the currency of my home.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“The real question is how, not whether, to teach phonics,”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“anger is not only a natural by-product of learning (as we see when children become frustrated by difficult tasks) but, more important, an “essential energy for learning” that helps children acquire mastery of skills such as curiosity and persistence.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“the experience of observing and interacting with the natural world right there between the cracks in the sidewalk remains one of the most fundamental building blocks of healthy development.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Another major study in 2006 found that children’s behavior problems in kindergarten did not predict their academic attainment by the end of elementary school. These findings suggested that it might be adult expectations of young children that are off kilter, not the children themselves.31”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“there are many studies affirming the benefit of this kind of self-talk as an internal regulating strategy, and evidence suggests that smarter and more playful children do more self-talk than average.23”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Prior to the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) in 1975, thousands of children with disabilities were not able to attend school; unbelievably by today’s standards, the wealthiest nation in the world did not guarantee a public education for all.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“It’s a special characteristic of the American psyche that we always seem to turn to teachers to solve social problems we can’t find better ways to address.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“day, the principles of child development remain blessedly, and sometimes annoyingly,”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“One of the great advantages of a mixed-age group is that it’s a kind of self-contained system, like a terrarium. Older kids like to play with younger children because they can control them. Younger children like to be controlled. No one admits this, but it’s true. When the older kids get too mean or too rough or don’t respect the feelings of the younger children, the little ones rattle their chains: they go on strike, they break things, they tattle. So the system recalibrates itself naturally in most cases, in humans as in apes.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“The moment we acquire names and labels for things, it’s hard to resist using them, and it’s a fair question to ask if our greater sensitivity to children’s problems might be imposing hidden burdens on them.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.31 For our young children, what else is there to wish for?”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“We need to start treating young children as essential apex creatures whose care and feeding affects the whole fiber of our society.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“So what is the scientific consensus on the components of a high-quality program? According to experts such as Yale emeritus professor Edward Zigler (a leader in child development and early education policy for half a century), the best preschool programs share several common features: they provide ample opportunities for young children to use and hear complex, interactive language; their curriculum supports learning processes and a wide range of school-readiness goals that include social and emotional skills and active learning; and they have knowledgeable and well-qualified teachers who use what are known as reflective teaching practices. Effective programs also demonstrate careful, intentional programming that is driven by more than just scheduling whims or calendar holidays or what’s in the teacher guide this week, and they also take seriously the active involvement of family members.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“The average daycare provider lives on the edge of poverty, with hourly wages below those of truck drivers, bartenders, animal care technicians, and even some middle-class teenage babysitters. Certified preschool teachers make a bit more money, but retirement plans are almost unheard of for preschool teachers not affiliated with a public school, and preschools have rarely provided health benefits or other nonsalary remuneration.12 In Mississippi, catfish skinners apparently make more money than daycare providers. In some parts of the country, childcare providers don’t even need a high school diploma, and the care of dead people in funeral homes is more tightly regulated than the oversight of living children in early education and care settings.13”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“If I had to characterize the key difference between a high-quality and a low-quality preschool environment, it is this: in a high-quality program, adults are building relationships with children and paying a lot of attention to children’s thinking processes and, by extension, their communication.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“in a high-quality program, adults are building relationships with children and paying a lot of attention to children’s thinking processes and, by extension, their communication. They attend carefully to children’s language and find ways to make them think out loud. Sometimes”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Child’s play . . . falls into a huge category of supposedly natural behavior that is actually quite hard to accomplish without intention and assistance.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups