Overview

This innovative and thought-provoking book invites you to take a new look at your relationships with young children, reconsidering how toddlers’ agency can be nurtured inside relational dynamics of cooperation and compromise in support of everyone’s wellbeing. The book presents ethnographic findings on the culture and needs of toddlers through a close look at the behaviors and situational context of two-year-old Emily. Through this example, the author offers observations of common social practices in early childhood contexts, including how adults sometimes implement age-based segregation, practice over-infantilization, and excessively manage the time and bodies of very young people. Inviting self-reflection and inquiry into the limitations of some of the frameworks we live and work within, the book details action strategies for shifting adult-child relationships from vertical/hierarchal structures centered in power and control into horizontal/reciprocal structures centered in cooperation and trust. Moving these ideas from research and theory back into preschool and classrooms, A New Vision for Early Childhood is important reading for any preschool teacher, leader, or parent who wants to be supported in honoring the agency of their children, taking care to know them more than change them.

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9781032577029

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A New Vision for Early Childhood gives us a compelling understanding of who children are, what they need from parents and teachers, and what they are capable of. And here's some relieving news for parents: We can stop hovering. We can do less. We can trust more. - Dr. Becky Kennedy, CEO & Founder, Good Inside. Deeply personal and richly detailed, Hichenberg’s illuminating exploration of a child’s life is essential reading for parents, educators, and all those eager to understand the troubling experience of young children today. - Dr. Paula S. Fass, author: The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child A New Vision reframes the toddler world so we can radically reframe our relationships with young children and let go of adult-driven control. An eye-opening book every parent and educator must read. - Dr. Tovah P. Klein, author: Raising Resilience; How Toddlers Thrive; Director, Barnard Center for Toddler Development Using cutting-edge approaches to human development, Hichenberg lays out profoundly novel perspectives about young children. A New Vision is about the urgent need to challenge our faulty notions about children, parenting, and ultimately, ourselves. Written in an accessible way, the book speaks to a vast audience of scholars, parents, teachers, and de facto all adults. - Dr. Anna Stetsenko, author: The Transformative Mind; Psychology professor, CUNY Graduate Center In vivid detail, Hichenberg shows how our expectations of young children actually diminish their remarkable capacities and competencies. A New Vision artfully recasts their resistance to our expectations as their need to explore, to be set free, to find their way in this world. - Dava Schub, CEO and Executive Director, Children’s Museum of Manhattan

Author Information

Noah Hichenberg is a preschool director and classroom teacher in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor at the American Jewish University’s School of Educational Leadership. He received his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in curriculum and teaching with a focus in early childhood.

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