When we paid for our 3-year-old firstborn’s preschool, I
remember vividly – even after 21 years – thinking to myself how other families
could afford preschool. It was an option that I was willing to let go, but my
husband insisted that we would send both of our children to preschool. He did
not want to miss opportunities to provide both of our children with preschool
advantages. I know that there are families who would love such opportunities,
but would never be able to afford quality childcare and preschool.
Why would our society not want to fund quality services and
programs for ALL children?
McGowan (2014) outlined a list of five lessons we can learn
from the history of child welfare services; they are what we call early
childcare and education programs today. I think three of them are worth
mentioning here:
1.
We can never perfectly resolve the tensions
between the interests of children/families and the community at large.
2.
Our willingness to invest adequately in the
provisions of services to enhance the well-being of families is “meager and
begrudging at best” (p.41).
3.
Although children’s needs would change over
time, our social responsibility to support those children and their families
remains constant.
Why would we be reluctant to invest in early childhood
programs for all children?
Some of the reasons why we do not invest more robustly in
such programs include:
1.
parents’ rights versus children’s needs;
2.
federal versus state versus local
responsibility;
3.
public versus voluntary financing and service
provision;
4.
developmental versus protective services
5.
specialized professional services versus
informal, natural helping networks.
(McGowan, 2014)
Sadly, “all these issues appear and reappear in the major
historical documents on the American child welfare system” (McGowan, 2014, p.11).
Although most Deaf babies are eligible for intervention
services from birth to 21, not all of them receive such services. California
has a 94% rate of follow-up after families’ initial newborn hearing screening
tests. Sometimes, families still fall through cracks.
As for early services for deaf children, we are faced with
the polarizing service provision viewpoints of professionals providing specialized
services and Deaf adults who are able to provide with more natural helping networks
such as serving as language models to Deaf babies and their families.
NAEYC has 10 program standards, and #8 is Community
Relationships. Deaf communities in the United States are a resource that is
underutilized. “Relationships with agencies and institutions in the community
can help a program achieve its goals and connect families with resources that
support children’s healthy development and learning” (NAEYC, n.d.). They
provided some examples of an ideal community relationship; it involves inviting
American Sign Language (ASL) performers and artists of which there are many.
For every dollar invested, we get an average annual return
of 7-10% (Children’s Defense Fund, n.d.). This really begs the question why we
would not invest more robustly and less begrudgingly.
References
Children’s
Defense Fund. (n.d.). Early childhood development & learning. Retrieved
from: http://www.childrensdefense.org/policy/earlychildhood/
McGowan, B.
(2014). Historical evolution of child welfare services. In G. Mallon and P.
McCartt Hess (Eds.), Child welfare for the twenty-first century: A handbook of
practices, policies, and programs (pp. 11-43). New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
NAEYC. (n.d.).
The 10 NAEYC program standards. Retrieved from: http://families.naeyc.org/accredited-article/10-naeyc-program-standards#8
