Author: Nola Jones

Almost no one is aware of a particular type of government program that performs remarkably well. It doesn’t make news. Politicians don’t discuss it in speeches. And yet, somewhere between June and August, thousands of children line up at parks, churches, and school buildings across New Mexico to collect a free, nutritious meal — no paperwork, no income verification, no questions about where they come from or what their parents earn. Just food. New Mexico’s Summer Food Service Program, now administered by the Early Childhood Education and Care Department, is doing something that sounds almost too simple to be interesting:…

What most American cities have only debated in budget meetings and stalled legislation, New York City has accomplished. Earlier this year, Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani united to announce 2-Care, a program that provides free child care seats for two-year-olds throughout the city. Children were present at the press conference. Cardi B participated in a jingle competition. Then, astonishingly, there was Barack Obama, who gave the kind of informal endorsement that usually spreads: “This is what we need.” This promise at least came with funding, which is a welcome change for a city used to big promises that…

A restless toddler in a grocery store, a meltdown developing at a restaurant, or a lengthy sideways car ride are moments that most parents can relate to. The phone is produced. The cartoon begins. The sobbing ceases. It seems to be a lifeline. Additionally, almost half of American parents reach for that lifeline on a daily basis, using screens to control behavior that is just too taxing to deal with in any other way. They are not judged for it. However, pediatricians have been silently observing for a considerable amount of time. They have also recently ceased to be silent.…

In a Head Start classroom on Chicago’s West Side, there is a specific type of noise: the scraping of plastic chairs, fights over crayons, and a child sobbing by the window for an unidentified reason. For the majority of onlookers, it appears to be typical chaos. It is information to a qualified mental health consultant who is standing silently in the corner. That consultant, who is composed, perceptive, and taking notes, is a part of an initiative Chicago has been quietly developing for years: an attempt to bring mental health support right into the room where four-year-olds spend their days,…

When a child stops talking, a certain kind of silence descends upon a Lagos classroom. It’s not the fidgety, restless silence of boredom, but a heavier withdrawal that seasoned educators are aware of but seldom know how to describe. Years ago, Dr. Amara Osei observed it while traveling between early childhood centers in Lagos’ expansive outer districts, where school compounds serve as after-hours gathering places for the community and corrugated rooftops trap the afternoon heat. She would later contend in her award-winning research that this silence is the result of unresolved childhood trauma, which has been mistakenly interpreted for far…

There’s a classroom somewhere in Washington, D.C. — small chairs, finger-painted artwork taped to walls, the faint smell of crayons — where something quietly remarkable has been happening for years. Mothers in that neighborhood are working at rates ten percentage points higher than before the city launched its universal preschool program. Not as a result of a large-scale ideological experiment. Simply because someone decided to watch the kids. That detail, small and almost domestic, sits at the center of what has become one of the more serious economic debates in American policy circles. The economic case for universal preschool isn’t…

When you care about something that no one else seems to care about enough, you get a certain kind of tiredness. Early childhood receives very little attention in rooms where development economists quarrel over GDP projections and education ministers debate budgets. However, a quiet but determined movement has been emerging throughout Africa somewhere in that ongoing gap between what is discussed and what is actually done. At the center of this movement is a woman whose work through OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, is starting to change the way the continent views its youngest citizens. When observing…

Last week, Connecticut did something truly out of the ordinary. The Early Childhood Education Endowment will receive an additional $320 million from a state budget signed by Governor Ned Lamont, bringing the total to $620 million in less than a year. That’s an incredible sprint for a program that didn’t exist prior to 2025. You could practically feel the collective sigh of child care advocates who have spent years advocating for this kind of commitment as you stood outside Hartford’s Capitol building. However, many of those same advocates are already cautiously and quietly questioning whether this is sufficient. A genuine…

Early childhood education is undergoing a quiet revolution that has nothing to do with touchscreens. Neither a monthly subscription nor a Wi-Fi password are necessary. It is made of cardboard and is located on a table in a Michigan preschool classroom. Since Professor Krystyna Nowak-Fabrykowski of Central Michigan University traveled to Bologna, Italy, to present her findings at the World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s international conference in 2025, Super Me!, a matching card game created to teach empathy and emotional intelligence to children as young as three, has drawn attention in the research community. The study was small in…

Even with half-finished crayon drawings and an abandoned puzzle by the reading nook, a Tuesday morning in almost any preschool classroom still gives the impression that childhood is going according to plan. However, a different picture begins to emerge when you take the time to speak with the educators, the pediatricians, and the weary parents who are waiting for someone to explain why their four-year-old has had his third meltdown before nine in the morning. Young children’s coping mechanisms have changed, and the clinical community is just now starting to catch up. By all standards, the United States’ preschool expulsion…