Episode Summary:

Dr. Dan Wuori

In this episode, Jeana and Dr. Wuori discuss his new book The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong About Early Care and Education (and What We Should Do About It) and explore a number of its surprising and fascinating elements. With over 30 years in Early Learning, Dr. Wuori is the founder of Early Childhood Policy Solutions, a bipartisan public policy consultancy. But across the globe Dr. Wuori is known to parents for his innovative use of social media and daily video child development lessons - for which he was recently featured in the New York Times. Dr. Wuori is also a Strategic Advisor on Early Childhood to the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, which - as in his prior position at The Hunt Institute - includes working alongside governors and state legislators to improve policy.

Visit: http://startingatzeropodcast.com

Produced by the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation.

Dr. Dan Wuori - author:

https://danwuori.com

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/saul_zaentz

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SaulZaentz

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/SaulZaentzCharitableFoundation

About Jeana Ross:

Jeana Ross is a lifelong educator who believes that early childhood education is a key component of a strong economy at state and national levels. As former Secretary of Alabama’s Department of Early Childhood Education, Jeana led successful efforts to grow the state’s early learning program which earned consecutive recognition as the nation’s best throughout her term. Recently, Jeana was elected to the Alabama House where she intends to prioritize education. In addition, Jeana advises the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation on Early Education Policy & Practice regarding its efforts to work with policymakers, nonprofit organizations, funders, and practitioners to support the early education workforce and advocate for increased funding for high-quality early childhood education.

Scientists know that for babies, learning starts right away. But when it comes to early care, maybe we've all got some learning to do? Dr. Dan Wuori says that the difference to policymakers and to the rest of all of us could be in the billions. Welcome to Starting At Zero ... Starting At Zero - imagining a world of high quality education for our youngest citizens. I'm Jeana Ross. As an educator, policymaker, mother and grandmother, it's my passion to advocate for the futures of our children. Today, we'll talk with Dr. Dan Wuori, the founder of Early Childhood Policy Solutions, a bipartisan public policy consultancy.

He's also a strategic advisor on early childhood to the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation. The early phase of Dan's career included being a kindergarten teacher and also a school district administrator before he moved on to South Carolina's early learning initiative, First steps. Next. Dan joined The Hunt Institute, working alongside governors and state legislators to improve policy. But Dan is known to thousands and thousands of parents across the globe for his unique social media presence, which was recently profiled in the New York Times. It's an undeniable fountain of cuteness - seen through the lens of child development. Dan's new book makes a memorable argument that America's current approach is completely upside down but that together, we could turn it right side up. Hello, Dan ...

Thank you for taking time today to talk with me about, oh, just all things Dan Wuori and what you've been up to. I'm very excited about your new book, "The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong About Early Care and Education and What We Should Do About It." Give us a little insight into this interesting title. What is the daycare myth?

Yeah. Well, Jeana, first off, thank you for the invitation to be here. I'm thrilled to have the conversation. And, yeah, the book has sort of deliberately a bit of a provocative title, The Daycare Myth. For almost 100 years in this country, we have thought of care and education as being two different things, separate and distinct. But that is contradicted by decades of brain science. And so the book sort of lays out the case that daycare as we know it, at least as we have conceptualized it, really doesn't exist. And what I mean by that is that we have thought of daycare, or more recently, childcare, as being this sort of safe, warm, hopefully happy place for young children to stay while their parents are at work during the day.

But we've thought of that as very different from education. And so the "Daycare Myth" title really speaks to what I consider to be maybe the fundamental problem we talk a lot about the early childhood sector being in some variation of crisis or multiple different crises. But to me, the number one crisis involved here is really a crisis of understanding. And so we have, for the better part of 100 years at this point, sort of fooled ourselves into believing that young children require care, whereas older children get involved in education and learning. And what we know is that that is just simply not the case. We know better than we ever have. Not only that young children are learning from day one, but increasingly, we understand the powerful ways they are beginning learning in utero, even in the policy conversations that we, you know, we frequently talk about, you know, childcare on one hand, and preschool or early childhood education on the other. And the real point, you know, of part of the book is that there is no distinction between those two, that, you know, that for young children, all environments are learning environments, and really, it's just a question of their quality.

I think it's fascinating that we know now from research that babies actually start learning in utero.

Isn't that fascinating, Jeana? I mean, to me, that is the most interesting part of kind of the emerging literature base on young children and their development. And we know this in a couple of different ways. We know that somewhere between 18 and 20 weeks of gestation, the children's hearing begins to become active. And the very first sounds that they hear are their mother's heartbeat, the pumping of the blood through their mother's body, their digestive rumblings, and very much the rhythms and the patterns of their mother's voice. And so how do we know that they've learned something about that? Well, in research studies that have been done in just hours after young children have been born, we know from their sort of differential responses that children can identify the native language of their mother and sort of choose and select it over recordings of other, you know, other languages that they are better attuned to their mother's native language. There's a fascinating study out of out of France, for example, they read repeatedly to mothers in-utero, or mothers of children in utero, read the book "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," and they read it each day in French to their French soon-to-be-newborns. And after birth, researchers went in and they looked at the brain activity and the brain waves when they read children that same book in French, in English, and in Spanish. And you probably won't be surprised to know that the french babies who had heard that story told over and over in utero, in French, showed a preference, and their brains lit up when they heard the story in French in a way that they did not when, you know, when it was read to them in Spanish or in English.

There's some fascinating research around music as well. We know that young children soothe very differently after birth to music that was played for them. A study that looked at the children that heard the song twinkle, twinkle, little star every day for weeks during the final trimester of pregnancy and showed how they soothed to that song differently, not only right after birth, but even months later. They showed the recognition. And then my very favorite part of this research, there was a study that said, suggested that that same thing may be true, that children soothe to the sounds of the tv theme songs, to some of their mother's favorite programs to which they were exposed in utero. So, you know, it's a fascinating kind of emerging line of research, but I think the more we know, the more we know that learning, important forms of learning, are beginning even before children come into the world. And that that happens in particular, during the final trimester, the final weeks of pregnancy.

Amazing. Who is this book for?

So I think about the book as being really for three different audiences, primarily. The first of those is parents who are looking at the choices that they're going to make on behalf of their own families and on behalf of their young children. Importantly, a second audience is policymakers. I mean, the book is, as, you know, heavily focused on some of the missteps that we are making in early childhood policy in this country. And so I do think that policymakers are a key audience here. And then the third audience is really early childhood professionals, those working in the field.

Dan, can you tell me how you got into early education to begin with?

You know, for me, my early childhood is actually my second career. Not a lot of, not a lot of people know this, but I, you know, my bachelor's degree and my initial work was in Broadcast Journalism. And, you know, I worked in radio for a number of years as a younger guy and really loved it - until I found that I didn't. I, you know, I kind of jokingly say that I had a, like, a quarter-life-crisis and really had this sense that, you know, what I was doing was nothing, making the mark on the world that I hoped that it was. And it was around that time that I was invited by a very dear family friend who ran an after school program at a local elementary school. They were short staffed, and she was in a bind and asked if I might be able to come for a couple of afternoons to fill in. And, gosh, Jeana, it took me all of about 15 seconds to realize that I had made a terrible mistake in life and that I was meant to work with kids. I, you know, just, I've had the opportunity to work at a lot of different levels in this field.

I would say, you know, all gratifying in their own way, but, boy, working directly with children and, you know, forging those really direct relationships was such a special part of my career. What's kept me in the field, though, and what drives me still to this day has been the opportunity progressively to influence and hopefully impact the lives of more and more children. So as a kindergarten teacher, I had that special connection, but only with a group of maybe 25 kids a year. Whereas, you know, then I was able to go to a school district level and, you know, have some, some influence over what happened for thousands of children. And then, you know, progressed to the state level, where it was hundreds of thousands. And then at the Hunt Institute, you know, the opportunity to do that, you know, all across the country. And so it, you know, it. My career progression has also been a progression in impact.

How about you? What drew you into the early childhood field?

Well, actually, my first interest was in child psychology, because I was always interested in people. You know, why were people like they are? You know: what makes this person one way and another person a different way? And then as I got more into that, I realized that it all happens in those early years and that the child development part of it was exactly what I was looking for, for the answers of why people are who they are. And then, you know, my career progression, Dan, it was much like yours ... only I did stop. I started teaching early - you know, right out of college, and then I stayed home for 17 years! You know, I call that my "17 year child development lab" as I watched my own children grow. And then as they left home, I had just this strong desire to make a difference in the way people were successful.

And I wanted to do that with young children. And so I went back into the classroom as a pre k, actually teaching assistant because it was a title one program, and they only had funds to pay for a teaching assistant. So that's what I did. And then over time, was able to get involved with our state pre k program on the grassroots end of it, where we were actually building that program, you know, putting together over time with people in the field, all those structures and functions and processes that make a really good program, a good environment, a good place for children. And it's like you've said, how did we develop those adult child interactions to where children were getting what they needed socially and emotionally to begin with and then being able to take that and then achieve more as far as the academic pieces of it. So, you know, I think that, bottom line, it was just a lot, like you said, just being able to make an impact on people's lives in a positive way.

Well, I love the way you describe that phrasing of sort of understanding why people are the way they are. And I think that's, you know, that is actually one of the major lessons of the book, probably not communicated in exactly those words. But, you know, I think you've, you know, if people take anything away from this book, I hope it is that these early years are of terrific consequence and that, you know, so much of, you know, how we think, how we interact, how we form relationships, even as adults, all have the, you know, all find their roots in our experiences as young children. And so the, the more we can make those really fantastic experiences, the better off we're all going to be for decades to come.

Dan, I've known you for many years, thanks to your work with elected leaders in the early childhood policy space. But to thousands of parents across the world, you're known not for policy, but for your innovative use of social media to educate on child development. This creative and clever way to educate and provide important information is so popular that the New York Times recently profiled your work, calling your Twitter account a font of delight, an edification, educational, but also, simply put, aw. Tell me about how the social media posts came to be and how they connect with your book and your work in the policy space.

Absolutely. I will tell you that New York Times piece was a real wonderful surprise when they reached out. And social media has been, has been very good to me. But I will, I will confess Jeana, that, you know, originally, there wasn't so much a master strategy involved here. I was, I had been on Twitter or now x for, you know, many years and had a professional account where I was actually posting a good bit about the policy work that I do day to day. But I did notice somewhere along the way, about probably two years ago now, that social media was also just this incredible, incredible treasure trove of video examples of child development. And so it has just struck me that, wow, what a wonderful resource for parents, for teachers is now available with all of these Instagram and TikTok videos that are floating around. And where I have sort of found a niche here is in sharing those videos, but also then combining it with sort of some conversation through the lens of, well, what does this mean? What are we seeing here? And helping parents and teachers to understand? Yes, of course these videos are cute, but they're a lot more than cute.

They're really amazing, right? That there's important lessons about development and learning that are happening in these videos that I think, you know, with just a little bit closer examination, you know, can really help to be illuminated and help to teach important lessons for parents and for grandparents and the like. So it's been, you know, it's been very gratifying, the response to all of that social media. And then, you know, to the question of how does the, how does the child development focus of the social media accounts sort of connect with the policy piece of the book? I really see this as, like, fitting hand in glove in a lot of ways. And I think about it sort of as like an if then statement, right? That, you know, in the, in these videos, I hope that I am helping to illuminate all these great things that are happening and helping people to understand just how important and how powerful the learning during this early period of life is. And so that's the if part of the statement. The then part of the statement is then, so what do we do about it, right? What if we know that all of these amazing things are happening for young children during the earliest months and years of their lives and are able to illustrate this? How well does our public policy match up with that need? And that's really what the book is sort of getting at, is this disconnect between the two.

The book is centered around what you describe as the "Three Simple Truths of Child Development." What are these?

The first is that learning begins in utero and never stops, right? Learning is not something that begins when we enter the schoolhouse door in kindergarten. It's something that is happening even before you meet your baby. The second is that the period from prenatal to three is the single most consequential window in all of human development. It is the timeframe during which the fundamental architecture of the brain is wired in ways that will go on to support or hinder our long term success in decades to come. And then the third of these is that optimal brain development is really highly dependent on stable, nurturing relationships with highly engaged adults. And taken in combination, these three have really important implications, Jeana, for our nation's public policy.

If we think about childcare as just a place where children are kept safe and warm while their parents are at work, we're missing out on the opportunity to really maximize development during this really important window of development. And that third truth about the nurturing, stable adults is a particularly important one that applies not only to parents, but to the importance of the early childhood workforce.

How have your experiences helped you narrow it down to these three?

Oh, that's a great question. You know, I've had the good fortune to work in the early childhood field, I know, as have you, Jeana. Over a period of decades, I've got more than 30 years in the field, and I began my career as a kindergarten teacher, and so actually got to see, you know, not so much working with infants at the time, but certainly working with young children had the opportunity to see really firsthand how all of these things play out and just how powerful the learning of young children really can be. You know, in part, it was also my experience as a parenthood that really opened my eyes to the powerful brain development that is happening as children develop language, as they begin becoming mobile, for example, and as their thinking progresses. Those first 36 months are absolutely crucial.

Why should parents and policymakers want to use these "Three Simple Truths" to frame their decision-making?

I think the first answer there is because they're grounded in evidence. It's a very different way of looking at and thinking about the years of early childhood. I think right now we've got about 100 year history of investments in children that are maybe not really so much investments in children as much as they are investments in the workforce participation of their parents. And that that has been premised in part on this idea that, you know, that young children only need care. When we acknowledge, though, that learning is beginning in utero, it really causes us to rethink our approach, maybe to what's happening with young children during this period. You know, one in four American mothers actually have to return to work within two weeks of giving birth in this country because of lack of paid family leave. And so at precisely the time that young children are most relying on the stability and these nurturing relationships with their primary caregivers, we frequently see those relationships interrupted. And that is not to say, by the way, that childcare is a bad thing necessarily, but what it does mean is that you have to be very careful about selecting the provider, selecting the adults that are going to be working with your children.

We have thought of childcare for a long time as sort of an industrialized form of babysitting, but we know that that's not the case. When you are choosing an early childhood program for your infant, for example, you're not choosing a babysitter. You are selecting the adults who will help to co construct your child's brain. And it's something that policymakers, I think, are really wise to take note of. A part of the book. As you know, Jeana, gets into the long-term cost of our current system, not only to children themselves, but to all the rest of us as taxpayers and interested parties in this system. And when we have a first three years that are not optimized in the way that they might otherwise be, then there are huge long-term consequences involved here that we see in k twelve education, that there is a need for more remediation, that children may be retained in a grade level, having to repeat a grade level, more special education placements, more reliance as they get older on social services, and even things as. As severe as interactions with the criminal justice system are all things that may result from our sub optimization of these early years.

And so if we can get these things right in the first place, One, I think we can do it at a much lower cost than paying endlessly for the results of our inaction. And Two, can really set children on a different sort of developmental trajectory as they grow and enter into adulthood.

Dan, as you know, the central question for state and federal policymakers often comes down to resources. And I was interested in how the book explains the economic case for investment in children, not only long-term, but right here and now, the short term. Explain exactly how we might pay for the system that we need?

One message that I have heard many times from policymakers recently is, "Okay, I think I'm starting to get the sort of brain development piece of this. I'm supportive, but how do we pay for it?" And my answer to them consistently is that we are already paying for the system that young children need in this country. Unfortunately, we're doing it in the dumbest possible ways. And that sounds like a joke, but it's actually nothing so much. We are saddling taxpayers endlessly with the results of the system that we have now, rather than proactively investing in the right system to begin with, which is a comparatively small investment. What we know from both the long term and the short term outcomes, first, in the. In the longitudinal sense, we know that over a period of decades, that high quality early childhood investments really pay off. The challenge for policymakers frequently is that they do these things over the full lifespan.

Frequently, policymakers are in a role where they're having to look at like, we need to pass a budget, and we have these, you know, we have these issues to deal with right in the here and now, and maybe don't always have the luxury of thinking about, well, if we, you know, if we do this proactively now, you know, two decades from now, we're going to see very different outcomes. But there is great research to suggest that this is economically a great idea, even in real time. Our colleagues at Ready Nation, which is a group of largely retired Fortune 500 CEOs who are interested in this topic, did a fascinating economic analysis about two years ago now, where they looked at the real time drain on the economy resulting not from childcare writ large, but from lack of high quality infant and toddler care alone. And what they found was that the american economy is losing out on 122 billion (billion with a "b") dollars each and every year. So in real time, last year, this year, and unless we change something next year, we're looking at this massive loss to the economy that is shouldered largely by parents in the form of lost and foregone wages, but also very much by employers who see less productivity and profitability as their employees are having to deal with childcare challenges. And then when parents aren't making the income that they might otherwise be, when employers aren't making the profits that they might otherwise be, then the state taxpayers are missing out on that because that's revenue that would otherwise be going into state coffers. And so I think we have a combination now of both long term economic evidence and real time evidence to suggest that this is costing us endlessly. I'll take it one step further...

The way we are funding early childhood education in this country is very much like a "payday loan," right? You borrow $100 in the short term to make it to payday at this astronomical interest rate, where you're paying far, far more in the long term than the money that you borrowed in the first place.

That's a great analogy. I'm going to use that one. So: strictly in a financial sense, this is not at all prudent.

Definitely not. And not only not prudent for the families of young children, but not prudent even for families that don't have children, or maybe who have grown children at this point and aren't thinking about young children.

The book also reveals a collection of ways that state and federal policies may have - despite good intentions - actually be exacerbating the childcare crisis. Can you talk through a few of those?

Absolutely. We could probably talk for hours about this very question alone, Jeana, but I'll give you a couple of examples. One example is what I have deemed in the book, an over reliance on school districts to deliver these services. This is something that we've seen a good bit here over the past couple of decades, in particular, as states have expanded state-funded pre-kindergarten programs. And I want to be very clear, you know, school district pre kindergarten programs, you and I both have had some connection to them, Jeana. They're absolutely fantastic. I don't have a quarrel with them at all. The challenge is that early childhood services haven't traditionally been delivered by school districts, that they have been delivered sort of by a broad ecosystem of providers, private childcare, faith based church preschool programs, Head Start programs, family childcare programs.

And the economic reality is, particularly for these childcare programs, that the provision of service to infants and toddlers is, I equate it to a loss leader on Black Friday before Christmas where they, they're selling TVs for $25, right? So they're bringing you in on the promise of selling a service way under the actual cost in hopes that you'll purchase other services. And childcare is actually set up very much like that. It's almost impossible to turn a profit on infant care. It's so labor-intensive and just requires so much supervision, and such small ratios between teachers and children that it's just not a profitable service to provide. The challenge with state funded pre-K, particularly when it is delivered exclusively in public school settings, is that it drains off of the childcare system children that are more profitable in that sense.

Right? That when centers are serving slightly larger numbers of three and four-year olds, for example, that is where they can offset some of the losses in infant toddler care. And so when those children are drained out of the long time early childhood ecosystem and in these childcare settings into public schools, it really has the potential to destabilize the availability even of infant toddler care in the country. So we have to be very careful about sort of the unintended consequences of even what are intended very much as good deeds in this early childhood policy space. It is one of the reasons why my home state and yours, Gina, have gone to what we call mixed-delivery systems, where private preschool providers, for example, are able to assist the state and participate in the delivery of state funded pre-K in a way that doesn't house all of those programs exclusively in public schools. And that's an important way of helping to stabilize the childcare industry.

The mixed delivery of the pre-K programs with the child care or faith based or community centers, I think, is very important. And we also have found that where you did have pre-K, the state funded pre-K, actually helping support a childcare facility that just lifted all boats we found that it really upped the quality of the childcare facilities and that they received, like, coaching and extra funding for playgrounds and the materials and supplies and equipment and that sort of thing. So I think that is a great, great point to make that we need to be very aware of. One of the things I think readers are really going to love about the book is the "guidance" for different audiences at the end of each chapter. How did this come about?

I really see the book as having three kind of interrelated but also a little bit distinct audiences: parents, policymakers, and early childhood professionals who are working directly with children. What we have done is at the end of each of the book's major chapters, have created a section at the end of that chapter that we call the "bipartisan blueprint for change." And the idea here was that we would break down and sort of encapsulate for each of those three audiences a quick summary of what does this mean for you, right? So at the end of, you know, at the end of each of these chapters, there's a section that speaks sort of directly to parents and a section that speaks directly to policymakers who may have very different opportunities and be able to take that same sort of general knowledge from the chapter but apply it in very different ways based on their sphere of influence.

One example was your "guidance" for parents selecting an early childhood program for their own children. So it would be great if you might share some of that advice with us?

Just a couple of things ... it's actually a pretty lengthy section. We probably can't get into all of it right here. But, you know, a couple of things that spring to mind. You know, first and foremost, Jeana, and you know this well from all of your years working in classrooms, the thing that I always advise parents to look at most is the interaction quality. Go and take the time to actually visit. Not for a kind of a quick, you know, 30-second walk through the classroom, but actually take some time and sit down and spend a few minutes, you know, observing in the classroom. And, you know, one thing in particular that you're going to be looking for is: where are the adults? Right? If you are in a toddler classroom and there are two adults in the classroom who are standing in the corner of the classroom talking to one another, then that should be a red flag for you.

Right? But if, on the other hand, what you see is adults who are down on the floor at eye level with the children, who are interacting one-on-one and face to face, and listening and exploring conversation with those kids, when you see those sorts of interactions, chances are good that you know that you have found a winner. I think frequently as we go and we look at early childhood service providers, we are often sort of taken in by our first impressions of the facility. I think frequently we make, as parents, sort of gut decisions based on the sort of the "vibe" we are picking up from the center itself. And I'm always quick to advise, given the choice between a beautiful state of the art building and amazing adults in those classrooms. Go with the adults every time. There are some other things that you could ask of the center director as you are looking at making that decision. One thing you might ask is about how long the average teacher in the center has actually been employed there. You'll find that this is a field with a very high rate of teacher turnover.

And so, boy, a good sign if you find out that a teacher has been working in a classroom over a period of several years, you might also ask about what's the starting pay for teachers? We know that in this field that very frequently teachers in childcare settings are making at or near minimum wage in their states. And so if you find that that is not the case, you likely aren't going to be dazzled by their, by their pay. But if you find that it's maybe a little bit above that rate in the field and a little bit more competitive in the market, also a really good sign. The last thing I would, you know, definitely encourage them to ask is about whether or not teachers get paid sick leave. We don't want teachers coming to work sick and exposing children, potentially to illness because they don't get paid if they don't arrive, right? And so the presence of at least some limited paid sick leave is a good indication that the program has the best interests of both their children and their teachers at heart.

Dan, I like to ask all of my guests: what is your favorite children's book and why?

Oh, you know, I'm a former kindergarten teacher, Jeana. That's like asking me to choose my favorite child. I am such a, such a fan of children's literature, and, gosh, it's hard to, hard to narrow down. Off the top of my head, I think I might point at Eric Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Not necessarily because it is my favorite to read aloud with children, though it's a fantastic one to read, but in my case in particular, because it is one that I remember from my own childhood, that it's something that I recall reading with my parents.

Dan, do you have a call to action?

I think ultimately, my call to action, both in life and in the book, is to recognize just how critical these early years are and to make decisions accordingly, right? And so that's, that really is sort of the theme of all of my professional work with policymakers. It's a major theme of the book. We need to really align our actions and our understandings, right? I'm a big believer that when you know better, you can do better. And so I think, you know, part of my, part of my effort on social media, for example, is to help people know better so that they can do better.

Where can our audiences find you?

Well, good news, Jeana: I am all over the Internet, social media. You can follow me on Twitter or now called x - @danwuori. That's d a n w u o r i, Dan Wuori. I'm also posting daily on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Threads, and you can visit my author website, which is also my name: danwuori.com.

Thank you, Dan! Starting at Zero ... imagining a world of high quality care, education, and success for our youngest citizens. Please visit us at: startingatzeropodcast.com. You can check out more episodes and also subscribe. On the website, you'll find links mentioned in the episode, along with transcripts, show notes, as well as exclusive materials shared by today's guests. You'll also find the video version of today's episode. That's startingatzeropodcast.com. If you found our insights on early childhood education valuable, we'd be thrilled if you could take a moment to leave a review. Your feedback not only supports our podcast, but also helps us spread the word about the importance of early education. Connect with me on Twitter and Instagram at starting at zero, and Saul Zaentz Charitable.

And I'm Jeana Ross on LinkedIn. I cannot wait to share our next conversation with you and imagine a future where every child finds early success.