Conference discusses 'American way' to raise children

By BILL J. PERRY

The way Americans train their infants and toddlers borders on violating their basic human rights, listeners were told at the “Bambini: Innovative Ideas for Creating Responsive and Resourceful Early Childhood Programs” conference held Friday and Saturday at the Satellite Student Union.

“The burden put on children and babies in the United States is criminal,” said Ron Lally, co-director of WestEd Center for Child and Family Studies and a key speaker at the conference.

“If we’re ever going to get infants what they need, we need to look at the way children are being treated in the United States as a violation of their human rights,” Lally said.

Lally said Americans spend so much time trying to get children ready for school that they fail to get the schools ready for children.

Lella Gandini, a featured speaker on the program, presented an approach to teaching children that was developed in the town of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy.

Gandini, the liaison for the dissemination of the Reggio Emilia program of early education, said it’s an approach that allows children to freely learn from their environment. Parents, teachers and child-care providers then work together to document the experiences with notes, photos and recordings to learn about the child, to monitor the child’s progress and to see what areas of learning can be improved.

Amanda Taintor, who works as staff support and development for the Fansler Institute for Leadership in Early Childhood Education, said that with this approach, “children get hands-on experience with the things around them.”

“For example,” she said, “when learning about the kitchen, children were allowed to play with anything they found in the kitchen, such as pots, pans and utensils. They even played outside with those things, touching them, filling them up with sand, pouring them out. What you develop with this approach is natural curiosity. They learn better, and it continues as they become adults.”

The Reggio Emilia approach differs from what is generally done in the United States, said Kristin Sullivan, the child development department chair at Fresno City College. She said the method here is to cram children’s heads with information, test them and then move them on to the next level.

“We keep moving children over and over again, breaking relationships,” she said. “Some of our practices take away the loving part; we do a kind of creative relationship fracturing.

“Relationships are a vehicle for learning. Adults are not interchangeable for children.”

The message that about 200 Fresno State students, community college students, faculty members and child-care providers from throughout California, as well as Oregon and Washington, were told was that the American way of training young children needs to be changed.

“The early childhood community is growing,” Taintor said. “Fresno County has one of the worst in child care (training) in all of California.”

“We have an expectation of what is necessary to provide for our children that is so low, that under the No Child Left Behind program, children are left behind everyday,” Lally said.