Web Resources

Just a reminder the website I am learning more about and exploring is "Center for the Study of Child Care Employment" (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/)

The specific section that really relates to my current professional development is that "Babies Don't Do Social Distancing." I remember when I went back to work after being furloughed day 1 a child sneezed in my face. This article is spot on about how young children cannot do social distancing, my child can't even walk yet. He is 10 months old and still needs to be carried everywhere, meaning there is not social distancing when he is around. The article talked about a double standard for schools/head start programs and childcare facilities. Schools/head start programs were closed to help protect more people, but many childcare facilities remained open without extra funding causing them to lose a lot of money. I think that the comparison is a big controversial issue, I think that many people still view early childcare education as a daycare program until children go to a real school. People are still unaware and uneducated about how important early childhood education is, and the amount that a child's brain grows in the first 5 years of life. This same article talked about congress coming up with proposals to help bail companies out during the virus; however, many childcare facilities were not included in that. Politicians claim that early childhood is important, but we are not receiving the help we need to continue to teach and care for these young children.

International

I chose to look more on the UNICEF website about poverty (https://www.unicef.org/social-policy), this website is a great resource and gives us a lot of information about poverty. UNICEF helps support children with cash transfer programs, reaches 7 million children in humanitarian settings, routinely measures poverty and reports it, and supports local governments' plans and budget for public services.
Three insights that I gained from this website and come directly from the website are:
1. On average, poor children worldwide die before their fifth birthday at twice the rate of their better-off peers
2. Nearly two-thirds of children worldwide are not protected from the lifelong consequences of poverty.
Around the world, nearly one in three children, roughly 663 million live in poverty.

Web Resource

The organization that I chose is Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/). This organization's purpose is “Conducting research and proposing policy solutions aimed at improving how our nation prepares, supports, and rewards the early care and education workforce since 1999.” One issue that catches my attention immediately is, “Why do parents pay so much for child care when early educators earn so little?” This catches my attention as both a parent and an early educator, childcare is quite expensive, and it makes it tough to pay weekly with how much I make. I am learning that these issues that I see in childcare are not just my issues, but more people have these issues. I am learning that I am not alone in how I feel and that there are people out there that want to make a difference.

The website that I chose to study is Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/professional-expectations-without-professional-conditions/) As I was searching through the websites I was looking for something that stood out to me, something that I could relate to. Once I opened this website I knew it was the site that I wanted to study, I am a preschool teacher and I relate to what I have seen on the homepage. The first thing that popped up was resources for teaching during this pandemic, articles about the little pay and expensive care, racial age gaps, and babies don’t do social distancing. As an educator all of these topics are something that happens every day, I love that there is a place addressing these issues. I want to ask my colleagues their thoughts on these topics and see how they feel about it.