Our interviewee, who grew up in Hartford, reminisced about her time in an early childhood education program in the 90s when she spoke with us. Though it wasn’t formal with the legislation that today’s ECE programs have, she recalls being in a mixed age program that focused on a combination of structured and unstructured play and learning. One of the things she remembered liking about it was that it gave the feeling of getting to grow up in a big family with many kids of all different ages playing together, but still getting the benefit of one on one attention while at home.
Her brother was older than her, and she benefitted from him being enrolled in a program because it made it easier for her to then be enrolled when the time came. Her mother was not free of the challenges facing many parents and caregivers today, saying that her brother was on a waitlist for a very long time before he was admitted anywhere, and that her wait was shorter because of him already being enrolled. Likewise, she recalls summers being particularly challenging to navigate as well. There weren’t really summer programs for young children – it was truly more of a “summer camp” or nothing. This is something that’s still a challenge in recent years that our interviewee has personal experience with. “I remember from working at The Haven,” she recalls, ““the waitlist is just insane. If you don’t have a spot by January, you’re just not there.”
Because summer care was so difficult to access, she talked about creative ways that families found for alternatives. When she was slightly older, she recalled how a common thing for many of the families in Hartford to do was purchase a pass to the Hartford public pool. Kids would be able to go and swim, and be supervised by pool staff, for long periods of the day. “My mom would give me a quarter a day, I’d walk about a mile to the pool and stay there for five or six hours, and then on the walk home I’d use that quarter to buy an ice cream,” she explained. It was a cost effective way for parents to find healthy, and fulfilling ways for their children to spend time when they weren’t in school.
Likewise, she remembered other programs that were developed more formally than the pool trend, but that looked to find ways to entertain and take care of kids outside of school hours when parents needed to be elsewhere, like at work. She talked about her school’s “walking club” — a companion to school breakfast programs. Starting at around 6:45 or 7:00 in the morning, students could be dropped off to walk laps around the field at the school. It was a destigmatized way of allowing for children to be dropped off early – framed both with a spin on being healthy (students get dedicated time to exercise outside) and with an incentive to join in on the fun (participation in the program allowed students to receive “footies,” which were small accessories that could be stuck to sneakers).
“I don’t know if they still do it,” she said, “but we all thought it was really cool.” She also notes that in particular, by framing it the way the school did, it helped remove stigma from kids who might otherwise be singled out for having to be dropped off early. Moreover, it gave parents the ability to drop their kids off early, something we’ve been hearing from many parents that is a huge struggle for them.
Related to early school programs, our interviewee also spoke about the flexibility that her family had in being able to drop her off at a childcare program before school, where the school bus could pick them up to go to school and then drop them off at when school was over. She wasn’t sure if that was still something that many families, ECE programs, or schools did, but it seemed like it could be worth looking into for those programs that would offer early morning or post-school hour care.
“I was just really struck by thinking back to my experience in the 90s… and thinking about the creative solutions to problems that might still be facing families today.” She also spoke to the necessary adjustment that we have to do when comparing how things worked several decades ago to how things might work in 2024. There are some creative solutions that might be worth bringing back around, to see if they still fit, but she also acknowledged so many challenges that are new in recent years – COVID 19 being a huge one. “I do think the pandemic did something – social interaction was through a screen,” she said, and continued on to talk about how she’s watched her nephew learn how to interact with other kids his own age in unstructured play, after years of being told to be cautious of other people due to the pandemic. Her sister, that nephew’s mom, works in early childhood education herself and is grappling with how to support kids and parents through that readjustment. For many children who were home with their parents while a lot of remote work and remote learning was happening, there is a developmental challenge that has emerged. The child knows that their parent is home, but they’re not engaging with them in the same way that they would outside of work hours. The kids don’t understand why, and she feels for their parents as well, who are just doing the best that they can. “For parents… what do you do?” she asked rhetorically.
Though programs like the walking club or creative ways to pass time in the summer at public spaces with other kids can’t answer that question, they are still worth thinking about as we grapple with the challenges facing caregivers struggling to access childcare in 2024.