For a long time, mothers were the primary focus of research on how babies learn to speak. Given that mothers have traditionally spent more time providing direct care and that the mechanics of maternal speech, that lilting, melodic style sometimes referred to as “parentese,” were well documented, that made some sense. When fathers were included in these studies at all, they typically appeared as supporting characters. New studies, including those related to Vanderbilt University, are starting to add complexity to that picture in ways that seem important to consider. Researchers are discovering that fathers do more than just mimic their…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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Watching a state legislature debate tax exemptions for data centers while thousands of kids wait on preschool waitlists is almost surreal. That is essentially what has been going on in Virginia for several months. Since the regular 2026 General Assembly session concluded without a budget and a special session in April yielded no results, lawmakers in Richmond have remained impassed. The families who rely most on early childhood programs are quietly bearing the burden of someone else’s political impasse as the July 1 deadline for preventing a government shutdown draws near. Children are not the main point of contention. It…
The fact that a Spanish early childhood organization traveled to Oslo to advocate for children’s rights is telling. Not to a UN meeting in Geneva, not to Brussels, but to a research congress in Norway centered around a classroom environment assessment tool. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-focused ECERS Congress may not seem like a clear area for advocacy. However, the decision made some sense for OMEP Spain. ECERS is not a curriculum. It’s an observational framework, a methodical approach to examining the physical and social surroundings of a preschool and determining whether or not it genuinely promotes the growth…
A teacher is teaching toddlers about waste and reuse somewhere in a Lagos preschool. In a nursery outside of Seoul, across the Pacific, kids are analyzing their clothing and inquiring about the source of the materials. Teachers in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina have submitted projects to an award program that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. A brochure was not distributed to any of these classrooms. Not one of their instructors received a cold email. All of them were reached by OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, without spending a dime on advertising. It’s important to comprehend how, as…
A group of three and four-year-olds are shown tending to a small fruit and vegetable garden that they helped plant themselves in a nursery somewhere in England. They give it water. They observe how things develop. Apparently, they quarrel over who gets to check on the seedlings. It’s simple to write off that picture as endearing but unimportant—just a pleasant classroom exercise. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, would disagree. The claim that those seedlings are far more important than anyone acknowledges has been developed over decades. Lectures and lesson plans in the conventional sense are not…
Sweden has been gathering data on the mood of its youth for over thirty years, and the results have not been encouraging. The nation’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study has shown a consistent increase in teenage mental health complaints since the early 1990s, including stress, sleep issues, and chronic depression. By 2014, schoolchildren in Sweden were reporting multiple health complaints at a rate that was almost twice as high as it was in 1986. That is a big change in a nation that, by most international standards, makes substantial investments in social welfare and education. It brought up a…
When you enter a participating nursery in the UK, you may notice something a little out of the ordinary next to the finger paintings and building blocks: a little booklet that resembles a passport and belongs to a child who is still unable to tie their own shoelaces. Under OMEP UK’s Early Childhood Sustainable Citizenship Award, that passport tracks environmental and social responsibility—a topic that most adults would be reluctant to label as preschool. The plan is understated, quiet, and methodical. It is also, in a small way, one of the more deliberate methods of teaching sustainability to young children…
There is a specific type of institutional enduring power that is rarely acknowledged; this type is developed over decades of patient, frequently underfunded work that most people outside of a specialized field are unaware of, rather than through flashy campaigns or well-funded lobbying. In many respects, Swedish OMEP is precisely that kind of organization. Its UNESCO Prize nomination has garnered some attention lately, but its origins can be traced back to postwar Europe, when a small group of educators and social thinkers believed that young children deserved better. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, was established in…
Wearing a “Save the Bees” T-shirt, James “Weston” Higginbotham left the Yamashina train station in Kyoto on the afternoon of May 29. He carried what people who knew him would later describe as his usual load: a book about butterflies tucked into his back pocket, a sense of purpose, and a love of movement. He had just gotten into a fight with his mother. He was twenty years old, a junior studying biosystems engineering at Auburn University. According to most accounts, it was a fairly typical family conflict, but within hours, no one could get in touch with him, and…
Somewhere in a Stanford lab, there’s a jar with something that looks like aged Parmesan. You can grate it. It has a salty taste. It is textured. It also tastes really good, depending on who you ask. The peculiar aspect is that it began as food waste, was given to a mold, and emerged as something a home cook might carelessly add to pasta. This is the work of Vayu Hill-Maini, whose biography alone makes the cheese seem almost predictable. He was raised in a multicultural home in Stockholm, developed a passion for cooking as a child, relocated to the…