1st Edition
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.
1. Interrupting Neverland; 2. An Imperial Childhood; 3. The Daily Life of a Two-Year-Old; 4. A New Vision for Early Childhood; 5. Stop Teaching, Stop Parenting
Biography
Noah Hichenberg is a preschool director and former classroom teacher in Washington, DC, 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.
A New Vision for Early Childhood gives us a compelling understanding of who children are, what they need from parents and teachers, and what they are capable of. And here's some relieving news for parents: We can stop hovering. We can do less. We can trust more.
- Dr. Becky Kennedy, CEO & Founder, Good Inside.
Deeply personal and richly detailed, Hichenberg’s illuminating exploration of a child’s life is essential reading for parents, educators, and all those eager to understand the troubling experience of young children today.
- Dr. Paula S. Fass, author: The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child
A New Vision reframes the toddler world so we can radically reframe our relationships with young children and let go of adult-driven control. An eye-opening book every parent and educator must read.
- Dr. Tovah P. Klein, author: Raising Resilience; How Toddlers Thrive; Director, Barnard Center for Toddler Development
Using cutting-edge approaches to human development, Hichenberg lays out profoundly novel perspectives about young children. A New Vision is about the urgent need to challenge our faulty notions about children, parenting, and ultimately, ourselves. Written in an accessible way, the book speaks to a vast audience of scholars, parents, teachers, and de facto all adults.
- Dr. Anna Stetsenko, author: The Transformative Mind; Psychology professor, CUNY Graduate Center
In vivid detail, Hichenberg shows how our expectations of young children actually diminish their remarkable capacities and competencies. A New Vision artfully recasts their resistance to our expectations as their need to explore, to be set free, to find their way in this world.
- Dava Schub, CEO and Executive Director, Children’s Museum of Manhattan
