Early Childhood Australia

            I must admit when looking through the website (http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/) it seems everything is relevant to my professional development.  This website contains information about almost every possible aspect of early childhood education.  The particular sections that spoke to me the most were school readiness and children’s transitions, social/emotional development, and importance of play.  The school readiness and children’s transition section has good information for both educators and parents about how to help children transition and be prepared for school.  The sections on social and emotional development talks about how to foster children’s development and behavior.  I particularly enjoyed reading an article about cyber bullying and how to prevent in early childhood through working on children’s social/emotional development and be aware of their social media.  They were speaking about how five year olds were on social media!  Yikes!  The importance of play is for educators, parents, and politicians.  It talks about how to foster play, how parents can support play, and the importance of play for politicians to support funding to early childhood.

            It was hard to find something on this website that was controversial.  I did find a statement in school readiness that I particularly did not agree with.  It talks about how children need to be able to handle more formal, structured learning and be prepared to stay on task, cope with transitions, and understand the rules.  I think the way it was written is what caught my eye.  It almost seemed that pre-k teachers need to set up a more formal learning environment to prepare the children for the structure of kindergarten.  I somewhat disagree with this statement.  I believe that we should let children be children in developmentally appropriate practices for as long as possible.  But I truly believe this is not what they are trying to say.  Preschool does need to prepare children for rules and structure and not run in chaos.  This is appropriate and I believe this is what they were trying to convey in their statement. 

            The information on the website validates the learning from this week about economists, neuroscientists, and politicians.  Early Childhood Australia (ECA) has used financial reports from economists to advocate more funding for early childhood from the politicians.  In fact in February, the ECA complied a financial report to submit to the Productivity Commission.  The research completed by neuroscientists fuels the advocacy efforts of ECA by showing the positive effects of high quality child care.  It shows that in another country the three are working to support early childhood and how advocacy efforts keep the fire burning.

            When exploring the website, a worldwide issue popped up that I didn’t expect to find on an early childhood website.  That is the issue of global warming and climate change.  I saw the headline and thought what does global warming have to do with early childhood.  So I read the article to find out.  It discusses how we need to find sustainability if we are to successfully survive our changing climate and ways to prolong global warming.  The article says the start of sustainability is teaching these skills to our children so they learn how to be resourceful from the beginning.  I found this to be very interesting and insightful.  Australia is taking global warming seriously and they want to do something about it and start with their youngest citizens. 

International Contacts and Poverty

            I have been working on the podcast alternative.  However, I am still waiting to hear back from the professional, Peter Paulus.  He is a researcher for Good Healthy Schools in Germany.  The premise behind Good Healthy Schools is that we need to keep children and teachers healthy in order to have a healthy society.  But what he has learned over the course of his research is that education is the key to promote healthy living.  Therefore through partnerships across agencies and communities, schools are able to better educate the children about the importance of being healthy and how to be healthy.  As I said I haven’t had luck in him responding to me.  However, I am looking into other international resources and contacts.  Fingers crossed that I actually have luck in my endeavor.

            I have even more bad luck trying to get to the website www.childhoodpoverty.org.  After several Google searches, I found websites and documents that refer to it and then one website that mentioned that the page may not be available after 2007.  Therefore since I am trying to contact people in Germany, I thought I would research poverty in Germany.  I was apprehensive at first because I remembered during the global economic crisis, that Germany stood strong through it all.  However, my research has pointed me into a different direction.  At the end of 2013, it was discovered that the government standing that Germany’s economy is doing well is actually not accurate.  The poverty rate in Germany is dramatically increasing and is at its highest point ever.  The reports the government used were based on research that was based on numbers in previous years.  But I was astonished at the fact that Germany is at its highest poverty point. 

            Another insight is that poverty is appearing in regions.  Germany is broken down into states and certain states are showing poverty increases.  The areas impacted most by poverty are located in East Germany, which doesn’t surprise me as much, due to conditions from the Cold War.  The trend in Germany is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer because West Germany doesn’t show the increase of poverty levels like East.  It reminds me of what I feel like in America, the rich are doing better and we are just getting poorer.  But I did find it interesting that poverty was across regions especially when comparing the old East and West Germany.

            The third piece of information I gathered was how poverty affected families and age groups.  The biggest rise of poverty occurs in people between 19-25 and lowest in 46-55.  I found this to be interesting but the reasoning behind it makes sense.  The younger people are just coming out of education (probably with school loans), entering the work force at lower levels (which means making less money), and people this age are moving out on their own without parents to support them as much.  These three factors lead to increase in poverty levels.  The adult with less poverty are ones that have been working for years, built up their pay and positions, and usually have kids that are older and/or have left the house.  They have more money and less expense coming out.  It makes perfect sense.  Also families showed trends in poverty.  Obviously those with the highest risk of poverty are single parent families.  We see this in America.  It is hard to financially manage a family on one person’s income.  I was raised in a single parent house.  Times were hard and we were lucky enough to have other family support.  The other type of family that is of greatest risk of poverty are two parent families with 3 or more children.  I admit at first that shocked me, and then it made sense.  The more children you have, the more money it will take to take care of them.  I also shouldn’t be surprised since both my husband and I work and we are barely scraping by with one child.  I couldn’t imagine 2 other children.  I did find the poverty trends interesting and enlightening. 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/06/germ-j06.html

http://www.inequalitywatch.eu/spip.php?article113

Sharing Web Resources

            The organization I chose was Early Childhood Australia.  Their link is

http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/  I spoke about their focus on my last blog but I will briefly restate it so you do not have to re-read it.  It is an early childhood advocacy organization much like NAEYC.  I am assuming it is similar to NAEYC because it appears that way from looking through the website and it has some links to NAEYC articles.  I like how it is a resource for providers, professionals in the field, and families. 

            The major newsletter published is called Voice and its latest issue came out in mid February and it can be accessed online at

http://earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/ECA-flipbooks/voice/ECA_Voice_1401/#/0

The current issue happening in Australia was on the front page and it caught my eye.  To sum it up, the government is looking at ways to create a more productive economy and is looking at early childhood as a place to put funding for that reason.  The two main reasons they are looking at more funding into early childhood is that it has better outcomes for children, which last into adulthood.  Also by children have access to quality care, the parents can feel better about putting them into care and re-enter the workforce.  Early Childhood Australia (ECA) is advocating for funding in the following ways.  They want 90% of 3-5 year olds to have access to quality care by 2020.  The are advocating for a new investment model that would allow low-income families to have 90% of their out of pocket costs of child care paid for and for the government to fund subsidies for low-income families.  Finally they are advocating for professional wages and further government support for other workforce development and training.  I about fell out of my chair when I read this article because these are things we are fighting for here in North Carolina and the United States.  I loved how the Australian government recognizes that investing in early childhood has economic benefits.  In North Carolina, we have an organization spreading that information to government officials and business people.  It is called the First 2000 Days.  Check out their website!  I also liked how ECA is asking for money to increase teacher pay and help further professionalize the field.  I know one issue in America is that centers are not able to pay the staff a lot of money and therefore the staff do not have the money for additional schooling without going into debt.  If our government helped, I know it would be a huge incentive for our teachers to get more schooling and degrees.

            What stood out to me the most from the newsletter coincides with a demographic issue:  socio-economic status.  It is hard for children from low-income families to have access to childcare much less have access to high quality care.  But in Australia, it is being advocated that at least 90% of children from low-income families have access to care by 2020, which is only 6 years away.  What surprised me even further is that subsidy for middle-income families is also being advocated.  In America, low-income families have to fight to receive subsidy and even then there is not enough money for all the families.  Middle-income families are not able to receive help.  It is enlightening that Australia is trying to help out other socio-economic classes.  I consider my family barely middle class and it is a struggle to pay for things.  One reason I started in early childhood is so I would not have to pay full price for childcare.  Otherwise, my family would not have been able to afford it.  I joke that I have to work hard to be poor.  But everyday I see families that make too much money to receive aid struggle to make ends meet and send their child to childcare.  Yet a parent cannot afford to quit work and be a stay at home parent because the family needs both incomes.  I commend Australia for recognizing this struggle and ECA for advocating on their behalf. 

Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

I have attempted contact with two professionals from Germany and Singapore.  I chose Germany because it is the birthplace of kindergarten and Singapore because it intrigued me.  Unfortunately, I have not heard back from anyone yet.  I am going to try again and wait a couple more days.  If I do not hear back from anyone, I will be working on the alternate assignment. 

            When looking through the selection of early childhood organizations, Early Childhood Australia caught my eye because it is an advocacy organization.  Being a part of NAEYC, I was interested to learn more about another country’s advocacy organization.  I was blown away by their website.  Early Childhood Australia mirrors NAEYC in several ways.  Both are advocates for children birth through 8 years.  Both websites contains information for their members, an online store for materials, position statements, information on their publications, etc.  Upon further review of Early Childhood Australia, their website went into further details about children, child development, and developmentally appropriate practices.  I would recommend it as a great resource for families as well as for providers.  It has great tips and ideas for both to use at home and in classrooms.  My favorite part is that the website has a link to information about SIDS.  I read through it and it suggests everything we do in North Carolina to prevent SIDS.  This is a great resource for new parents that are not always educated on SIDS and ways to prevent it.  I remember when I had my son I was not given information except to place him on his back.  I have heard other stories from parents, ones in our field, that were never given information.  I think it is very important that parents, especially new ones, understand SIDS, the dangers, and ways to help prevent it.  What do you think?  Overall, I recommend that everyone visit this website. It has great quick read resources about children.  It includes curriculum, behaviors, children’s rights, play in early childhood, etc.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  Everything that I read is what we advocate for and know in America.  I am going to continue to look through it for additional resources to use in my job.  The website is:  http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/