There are times when something changes in professional settings, but it doesn’t always happen loudly or with applause. Instead, there’s a collective silence that indicates the room has just taken in something that can’t be fully expressed. Approximately 800 educators, researchers, and policymakers found themselves in a setting that felt more like a reckoning than a panel discussion during the children’s mental health session at the OMEP World Conference.
These global gatherings have been organized since 1948 by OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, which was founded in response to a post-war need to safeguard the most vulnerable members of society. From its founding conference in Prague to assemblies in Lagos, Shanghai, and other places, the organization has persevered through decades of shifting political environments. However, this specific session ended differently for some reason. Maybe it was the timing. Maybe it was the weight of everything that has been building up around the world: wars uprooting families, ecological anxiety affecting children who are too young to identify their emotions, and digital environments changing emotional development in ways that scientists are still trying to figure out.
The OMEP framework’s central theme, which heavily draws from Janusz Korczak’s pedagogical philosophy, kept coming up in discussions. Korczak, a Polish-Jewish educator and children’s rights activist who died in Treblinka with the kids he refused to leave behind, made a radical claim for his day: children are current human beings deserving of respect now, not future citizens to be shaped. It’s not an abstract framing. It turns into a structural debate in a mental health session about how classrooms are set up, how distress is handled, and whether or not children’s emotional experiences are accepted as normal or inconvenient.
The specificity was one of the reasons 800 people stayed in that room and continued to converse in the hallways and over coffee afterward. Presenters did not use generalizations about policy. According to reports from early childhood centers, teachers had begun implementing what the Korczak framework refers to as “education without fear,” which includes eliminating punitive responses, consciously fostering trust, and viewing a child’s silence as information rather than disobedience. After his classroom environment changed for a few weeks, a four-year-old who had previously been classified as disruptive showed signs of relaxation, according to one educator. It’s the kind of story that seems almost too small for an international conference, but it’s just the right size.
As you move through the larger OMEP program, you get the impression that the organization is up against something big and sluggish. Early childhood education is still often viewed by educational systems around the world as preparation rather than experience, as foundation rather than life. In those systems, discussions about mental health are often marginal; they are crucial in theory, underfunded in reality, and usually delegated to experts rather than incorporated into regular teaching practices. The argument that this separation is the issue seemed to be made with genuine conviction during the session.
To be honest, it’s still unclear if this discussion will result in changes to policy. Conferences frequently result in the signing of declarations and commitments. Another such document that will be significant to those within the network but more difficult to find in classrooms two years later is the Poznań Declaration, which is anticipated from OMEP’s next meeting in 2026. However, not every one of the 800 individuals present was a bureaucrat. On Monday mornings, a lot of them instruct kids. Additionally, there is merit to discussions that alter people’s perspectives rather than their decisions.
That change—quiet, intimate, and unrecorded in any official outcome document—may be precisely what Korczak would have identified as education functioning as it should.
