Adrianna

“why should we settle for unimaginative goals (as we find in so many early education settings) like being able to identify triangles and squares, or recalling the names of colors and seasons? Recognizing visual symbols is something a dog can do. Surely we can aim higher than those picayune objectives and demand preschool classrooms based on a more advanced understanding of developmental processes, an understanding that is bounded only by the limits of a young child’s growing brain, not by a superintendent’s checklist of what needs to be covered before June rolls around.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Young children are for the most part just and moral. They love preachy stories because they do in fact understand that actions have consequences. Yet they turn to adults for the mercy and subtlety that they themselves can’t yet summon. And who can blame them? They are still little and vulnerable, uncompromising to a fault. . . . they want an adult’s protection from their own rough justice. This, I think, is the one true story of early childhood, the yin and yang of being a small person.

It’s confusing emotional terrain for children to inhabit, and we must guide them gently through it. Is it intimacy you want, or freedom? Protection or power? Childhood is a kind of enslavement, but it’s a liberation, too. Young children’s emotions are all about this basic conflict. Feed me. Hold me. Comfort me. Fix me. I hate you! I can do it myself.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Pretending is an essential language of childhood.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups

“Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups