NAEYC announced today a three-year grant from the Gates Foundation to expand access to high-quality early childhood curriculum and strengthen NAEYC’s presence in the growing landscape of publicly-funded pre-kindergarten.
Early childhood educators do some of the most important work in our communities. Yet despite the skill and expertise the work requires, early childhood educators remain among the most underpaid professionals in the country.
This article details a multifaceted, holistic approach for integrating social and emotional learning within the preschool day and offers ways that early childhood educators can adapt these practices to their own settings.
Authored by
Authored by:
Sara D. Hooks, Jennifer K. Pett, Janese Daniels, Nicole Vasanth
NAEYC promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research. We advance a diverse early childhood profession and support all who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children.
Because of intensified pressure on teachers to improve students’ performance and prepare them for standardized tests, educators and children are now navigating a significant increase in the number of formal assessments they experience yearly.
Every May, we pause during Teacher Appreciation Week to say thank you to the educators who show up for children every single day. And every year, "thank you" feels both necessary and insufficient.
There is a moment every early childhood educator knows. A child is deep in play, completely absorbed, doing something that looks, to an untrained eye, like nothing in particular.
NAEYC promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research. We advance a diverse early childhood profession and support all who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children.
NAEYC promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research. We advance a diverse early childhood profession and support all who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children.
Incredible learning unfolds in infant and toddler settings. The period from birth to age 3 represents a time of vast and exciting change as children move from early milestones to more advanced physical achievements.
This issue of Young Children explores what educator agency looks like in action, how it connects to intentional teaching, and how it benefits everyone in the early childhood ecosystem.
Toward Intentional Teaching: The Need for Educator Agency
NAEYC promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research. We advance a diverse early childhood profession and support all who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children.
The Spring 2026 issue of Educating Young Children is focused entirely on the preschool-to-kindergarten transition and reading it this week hit me differently than it might have at any other time.
The survey results and accompanying testimonies demonstrate a clear crisis of affordability for the early childhood education field and the children and families they serve.
NAEYC's Commission on the Accreditation of Early Childhood Higher Education Programs is pleased to announce that it has granted accreditation to early childhood programs during its spring 2026 meeting.
