Healing: Practice-Based Evidence

Data tell us that the children are not having good experiences in care in their first three years — the years that matter most to our healthy, human thriving across the lifespan. What data? NAEP, high school behavioral risk surveys, third-grade reading, preschool suspension and expulsion rates.

Many might argue for solutions to turn the curve on these data that are proximate in time to when the data are collected — better high school teachers, social programs in middle school, different teachers or methods in third grade, more interventions in the year before Kindergarten.

As a toddler teacher, I’ll tell you that these data could have been (and were) predicted by their baby teachers. We already know what to do and how to do it to turn the curve on these data points.

It was about six weeks into the school year in the second toddler program I taught in — my first as a ‘real’ teacher, not a student worker. We had just gotten to a point where everyone sat for lunch — eating was still another story, and the transition to nap was not yet smooth — but all sixteen toddlers were at the table.

Our preschool was in an old elementary school building that had been repurposed to hold two schools — ours and a French-language school in the other half of the well-maintained building. Often, we cared for the children of the Ecole teachers and the younger siblings of the K-8 students attending.

That year in our classroom, we had one of each from the Ecole — a child of the faculty and a student’s younger sibling. The first was quite fluent in French and had not yet been exposed to much English. The other, like many children learning multiple languages, had a few words each in English, French, and Arabic.

Lunch and the transition to nap also marked our daily transition of teachers—lunch was the period where all 6 of us were there before breaks began and we returned to our 1 adult to 4 children ratio. With all six of us there for lunch time, we adults sometimes connected with each other on behalf of ourselves and missed cues from the children.

As we settled in to eating on this day, I was sitting on the floor behind a child who was likely to get up and wander, helping him focus on his food. Across the table from me sat E, the child whose mom taught at the Ecole and whose English was only just beginning to blossom. Another teacher opened her lunch to find cold, leftover salmon and said, “Ugh! She always has such weird food!”

Data tell us that early care educators are more likely to be depressed than matched folks in other jobs — even without the known presence of a trauma history. Layered on top of this, additional data sets find a higher-than-average incidence of developmental, relational, historical, and systemic trauma in this workforce.

These layers intersect with the fact that early care education continues to not be funded as the public good that it is. The gap in funding is largely borne out on the backs of the women who do the work (and the children at the center, who also have to share their space with the dollar bill).

Several years ago, a colleague suggested that I observe the audience at a large early childhood conference event. Without delving into any of these layers of data, we could already guess, my colleague suggested, that the well-being of this workforce is precarious, just by looking.

She said that we can tell because we know what unhealed trauma looks like in the body, we know what a traumatized body that has not yet had the chance or the support to heal looks like. The “older than I should look at my age”, the weathering, and the slightly rounder midsection reflect the long-term toxic effects of cortisol.

These women are “educational athletes,” doing more physical work each day than most of us desk dwellers do in a year. They never sit down; they are moving, twisting, moving up and down from the floor, jumping to intervene with toddlers — active all day long.

Nonetheless, they show their trauma on their bodies. Just as we might mistakenly think that Kindergarten or third grade is a good time to address the problems showing in the children’s data, we might think that self-care or implementing “evidence-based practice” across early care education can address the gaps for adults the data show.

In my opinion (and remember these are my opinions here), there is no possible way to scale a complex, expensive individual intervention like therapy or mental health consultation or an array of EBPs like self-care training or requiring that every teacher attain a BA.

There is too much trauma being continually perpetrated by policy alone for an expensive EBP requiring an MA or 10 years of analysis to survive. The scale is just too massive.

But just like among our children, change is always, already happening. The possibility and challenge are wrapped together.

Both/And.

When the teacher unintentionally shamed a child’s food in my toddler classroom, I was sitting opposite the child. She looked around for safety, and our eyes met. Without a word, as I do not speak French, I honored her broken heart. She jumped out of her chair, ran around the table, and fell into my arms crying.

Because what babies also come with is an inherent sense of meaning. I matter, they might say, if they had the words. I do not deserve to be treated this way.

Babies, toddlers, preschoolers, AND all of us are always growing, learning, adapting to what is, moment to moment and over time. We know this as our human birthright from observing babies. They adapt to the context they find themselves in, in order to survive. Each baby human adapts to the relationships, the availability of nutrition, the ways of being with their community. That is how we survive as a species — because we adapt as babies.

These two things come together — our inherent sense of worthiness and our core ability to adapt for survival — in positive and negative ways. Sometimes we can assert our worth, pushing back against the systems and people who tried to deny it. Just like E did when she let all her feelings be known. Sometimes we can move, change, and adapt in a way that counters the mistaken messages about us.

When E jumped into my arms, she was resisting the message that her food, culture, comfort, and reality were somehow wrong. She was asserting the idea that she mattered and was already enough just as she was.

She was also engaging in the practice of adaptation together. WE believe in me, she might have been saying when she came to rest in my arms. A wonderful thing about toddlers is that they are fully somatically embodied. Even children learning and speaking the same language as the adults around them make sense through their bodies first before finding and applying words to their experiences in the world.

When I was at the bottom of the panic and breakdown period, it was my body that brought me back. No amount of language-based rationalization could make it right again. Colleagues offered many — just suck it up, this is what it’s like, you’ll get over it. But my embodied experience had all the resources I needed. It said, slow down, step back, care for yourself as you deserve. And the healing began then, even though it has taken and continues to take years for that healing to be fully present and alive again. Even though under every layer of healing there seems to be another ready to come up for healing next.

We all continue to thrive despite being intentionally harmed. And remember, it is not because of the harm but despite it that we heal. It is YOU that makes lemonade out of the lemons, not the system of oppression that tried to leave you with nothing, tried to tell you that care work isn’t real work. As Toni Morrison reminds us, YOU are your own best thing.

What if we could share with each other just something small that helps us change?

What if we could know our resistance and resilience together and celebrate our own Joy?

You already are.

You are already enough.

You already belong.

You are already amazing.

You are already full of practice-based evidence of your worth and the power you have to change everything, to be what each family and baby in your care needs to survive and thrive right now.

And that is how I think of that experience with E so early in my career as a toddler teacher. It is just a tiny bit of the practice-based evidence I carry with me.

Why did I lock eyes with her as the teacher opened her lunch? It just didn’t feel right. When I think of how that child looked at me and my heart responded, I knew we could do better for her. I knew in my heart what she needed (not to stay at the table just because it was lunch time). She needed to be seen, included, heard, and held in mind.

We do better just from observing our own practice-based evidence once in a while — editing our own practices once in a while. By responding to that feeling, adapting in the moment, I learned some skills I carried with me.

Slow down in the moment. Be open to the experience of the child and the experience in my heart.

Possibly, the interventions that are too unwieldy to scale now will still be too complex and expensive in the golden future when care work is finally treated as the public good that it is. Possibly, we’ll still need these core skills — observe children and their teachers, and then trust the humanity in all of us. Why not hone them now, when they are already here in our hearts and hands.

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