The ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly Article 12 on children's right to participate in matters affecting them, provides a rationale for including the voices of young children when seeking to better understand their lives. Early childhood educators collaborate and converse with young children in their daily…

Playgroups are a unique form of early childhood provision involving parents and their children attending together. Parents' attendance at playgroups provides opportunities for involvement in play. However, little is known about parents' practices of co-play in playgroups and the potential for these practices to enhance children's play experiences…

While there is an increasing global call for integrated approaches to early childhood development (ECD) policy-making and implementation, parenting practices are not consistently measured against comprehensive ECD indicators. This study on parenting for ECD in Ethiopia was guided by the Nurturing Care Framework (NCF) to capture parenting practices…

The article presents the results of a large-scale Polish project aimed at examining the quality of early childhood education and care using the SACERS research tool. Although the SACERS scale consists of 47 items, this article focuses mainly on the data concerning the assessment of space and furnishings of 140 school common rooms in terms of the…

Family-teacher relationships in early childhood education are recognized as both important and challenging. This qualitative case study used content analysis to examine the impact of infant mental health principles on preservice teachers' communication with the parent of a child in need of early intervention. Analysis of student work suggested…

There is a rapidly expanding and proliferating number of commercial early childhood platforms, competing for market share in what has become a crowded marketplace. Early childhood platforms provide a wide range of functions including an all-in-one digital ecosystem offering a learning management system; social media communication between…

This essay brings together three intergenerational colleagues, two RECE founders, and a mid-career colleague, engaged in reciprocal mentorship, collaborative projects, and research focused on child care, critical policy studies, and global childhoods. We explore our encounters with RECE and how we have engaged with, been influenced by, and found…

Contributing to recent work in the critical sociology of childhood, this article presents an ethnographic and discursive analysis of the multitude of cultural meanings associated with "child-centeredness" in US American early childhood education. Specifically, the article focuses on Waldorf education, a private educational alternative…

The international quality-improvement agenda for Early Childhood Education (ECE) directs attention to maximising children's learning experiences. Yet routines, and particularly those relating to sleep-rest provision, are not well conceptualised as learning opportunities. Often children who no longer sleep in the daytime are required to lie down…

This critical cross-cultural study examined the alignment of the 2022 National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) standards in the U.S. with Australian, Kenyan, and Nepali educational guidelines. Previously, NAEYC's educational guidelines adhered to Euro-Western notions of child development, with a biased view of normative…

Teaching young students requires more than just learning about child development -- it requires understanding children and their experiences. Teacher educators have seen a lack of such authentic understanding among future and current early childhood educators. The authors set out to change that in a bachelor of education degree program in northern…

With the importance of the early years of a child's life to their learning and development, it is important that early childhood educators are skilled, reflective professionals who have the ability to actively support the learning of all children. Using a capability approach to human development as an evaluative framework, this article explores…

Infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH) consultation has gained increasing attention over the years as an effective approach to supporting young children's social-emotional development (Brennan et al., 2008; Hepburn et al., 2013). The current syndemic (the aggregation of two or more concurrent epidemics that interact synergistically to…

As a society we want our children and young people to thrive and fulfil their potential. How then, can we best identify and respond to their needs in order to achieve this? In this lecture, Professor Claire Cameron takes the case of children in state care and the longer-term impacts on those young people of having been in care. In particular, she…

This article is based on a study of two early years services in the West of Ireland which was attended mostly by asylum seekers. Using a sample of the findings for illustration, we discuss how the study captured an example of culturally sensitive practice that demonstrated an ability to counteract some of the negative effects of being an asylum…