“It’s interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys. Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.”

“Friendship is often underrated, considering the tremendous impact it has on our well being. Early-childhood friendship is something that is frequently overlooked as a positive developmental influence. We don’t always realize how attached young children are to their friends.”

“WITH the introduction of universal pre-K in New York City, we have created a new entry point into our public school system. This raises a key question: What do we want our children’s first experiences in school to be? What does a good education look like for 4-year-olds?”

“One morning in March, early-childhood educator Erika Christakis was in a meeting with a woman in Windsor, Vermont, when she felt a pair of eyes on her. Wide, vacant eyes crafted from paper, to be more specific. They belonged to a construction paper groundhog made by the woman’s 2-year-old, and something about their bug-eyed stare caught Christakis’s attention. “It was a cartoonish, adult version of an animal,” she writes in her new book, The Importance of Being Little, “not something a toddler could have conceived or executed.” And, anyway, she wondered, what could the celebration of Groundhog Day even mean to a toddler?”