A New Vision for Early Childhood: Rethinking Our Relationships with Young Children

This innovative and thought-provoking book invites you to move away from strategies of control and toward relationships of trust with young children. This book presents the conceptual foundation for this re-framed relationship as well as pragmatic takeaways for parents and teachers of preschool-aged children. The book offers a concise, critical history of early childhood which is then laid against the author’s ethnographic research into the daily life of one 2-year-old. This unique and refreshing perspective offers intimate insight into the tension between the adult’s desire for control and the child’s capacity for resistance. The author argues that when the adult-child relationship is defined by control, the child is faced with the same choice on repeat: submit, or resist. Taking action in accordance with personal wants and needs typically requires transgressing adult expectations. For the child, in today’s hyper-surveilled childhood, to speak up is to resist. Moving these ideas from research and theory back into preschools and homes, A New Vision for Early Childhood is important reading for any preschool teacher, leader, or parent who wants to reconsider their relationship with children. We can become allies instead of sheriffs, working with children instead of against them.

Noah Hichenberg is a preschool director and classroom teacher in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor at the American Jewish University’s School of Educational Leadership. He received his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in curriculum and teaching with a focus in early childhood.