New Hampshire families have not been exempt from the disruptions and challenges associated with an enduring pandemic, including disruptions to their children's care and education arrangements, pressure on household budgets due to rising inflation, and challenges of meeting children's emergent social, emotional, and physical needs amid persistent…

Drawing on research in the context of Swedish school-age educare and adopting a post-humanist theoretical--methodological approach, we put forward the notion of mathemat-ing to conceptualise mathematical events that emerge in out-of-school configurations of practice. In them, ethical sensibilities as affects of engagement and rejection may be…

Families face challenging decisions about early care and education (ECE) for their children. Decisions about what is best for each child and family are constrained by family and contextual factors and are prone to disruptions. This study provides a descriptive look at patterns of ECE settings children were in the year prior to kindergarten,…

As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children--through duration expansions to the kindergarten day--to better understand mothers' and families' constraints.…

State Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS) can effectively support the improvement of school-age childcare programs by leveraging Program Quality Assessments (PQAs) alongside structured improvement planning and professional development. Real-world implementations in Arkansas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania underscore the impact and adaptability…

This study provides estimates for the impact of centre-based care participation during pre-kindergarten on Latino children's academic readiness skills at kindergarten-entry. Using the ECLS-K:2011 dataset, findings indicate that Latino children who participated in centre-based care during their pre-kindergarten year had significantly higher English…

Early childhood care and education (ECCE) is commonly understood in Malaysia as providing care and education for young children from the age of newborn until about six years old, before they enter formal elementary education. Various curriculum and teaching approaches were developed to enhance children's learning experiences based on their needs,…

In this paper, we analyse mechanisms of exclusion in Norwegian daycare facilities for children ("Skolefritidsordning -- SFOs), which provide after-school care. Such mechanisms are analysed and discussed as unanticipated consequences of reform policy initiatives or simply as accepted trade-offs left to the SFO staff's discretion. The data are…

This paper discusses self-efficacy as a key factor in children managing the transition to primary school, the threshold to formal education and further learning processes. In presenting results of a qualitative-longitudinal interview study of German preschool and primary school children's perspectives on their self-efficacy experiences, it…

The authors consider play to be critical and intrinsic to healthy human life and development, and they argue that children's right to play should be supported by the environment in which they live. Their study seeks to understand what children do when they appear not to play during free play periods at early childhood education and care…

This study explored options for pedagogical photo documentation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) practices to hear the voices of children, parents, and guardians in ways that make developing the documentation manageable for practitioners. Two Japanese kindergartens participated in an action research project entitled 'Wall Newspapers…

The academic achievement places children on a positive trajectory for their lifespan. The aim of this study was to examine the academic trajectories of children in out-of-home care (OOCH) and whether kinship care has a protective effect relative to nonkin foster care. The sample analyzed for this study consists of 519,306 racially diverse youth in…

California recently committed to making prekindergarten (PreK) universal through the expansion of transitional kindergarten (TK) and other state-funded programs. Between 2021-22 and 2023-24, TK enrollment doubled, from about 75,000 to over 151,000 children. Approximately 59% of eligible 4-year-olds enrolled in TK in 2023-24. Across publicly funded…

Transition to school is recurrently pointed out as key to children's immediate well-being at school start, as well as to their long-term educational endeavors. Aspirations towards continuity during transition is a common denominator across research, policy, and practice, in Denmark as well as internationally. This theoretical-conceptual paper…

This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents' earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents' labor market outcomes as well as…