ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

I am happy for Mississippi and especially for the deeply underserved children who are experiencing the benefit of this program. However, I see us headed once again toward a "one sizes fits all" consciousness that is disturbing. When are we going to understand that the needs of children with nothing are not the same as children with "enough" or with "abundance". The starting point is different. Case in point - I just learned of an exemplary child care center in Milwaukee that is above the standard imposed on them by the YoungStar system which is based on the lowest common denominator. The children in this exemplary center (one-third of the children are on welfare) spend hours every day outside vigorously playing in a forest. They also grow most of their food(organic) on site and are served healthy snacks and a hearty hot lunch every single day. This center uses zero screen time, prefering to bring enrichment to the children through human relationship and child-directed discovery. With the Young Star system, this exemplary center received zero ("0") points for their outdoor program, their food program and their screen time policy. Young Star's outdoor program is a set movement program, most likely established because of those centers where the children spend very little, if any, time outside, and is geared to insure that the caregivers and children are outside every day doing prescribed movements. They allow no equivalency for children who play outside in a forest hours every day - by the way, there has never been an obese child at the exemplary center I have written about - they eat so well and exercise through play every day. The Young Star food program points are also from a prescriptive approach that does not have any measurement scale for whole organic food, grown at the center and eaten by the children every day. Rather, they want a chart noting what each child has eaten - no mention of the actual quality of the food! And apparently the YoungStar measurement for a good technology policy is one that shows that "if" the children do have screen time, then it needs to be shown how that screen time is interactive. No points for human interactive time instead of screen time - no points for NO screen time. At the end of the visit, the director of the center just shook her head in dismay at what she was being told by the Young Star evaluator. The evaluator noted the frustration and said she was sorry that there was no equivalency measurement for a center above the standard. What is wrong with this picture, friends? If a child is drowning in a well of poverty, we have to start at the fundamental basic level - getting their child care providers geared toward any kind of movement, limited screen time and measureable food intake. If, however, a child has already been pulled out of the well and is thriving in an exemplary setting, we should not be throwing them back in the well so that we can start again at the lowest point! WAKE UP - PLEASE WAKE UP!