In August 2019, I walked into an early learning center in Philadelphia with a blank reporter’s notebook, a camera and a whole lot to learn.
Prior to that, I’d covered K-12 education and a bit of higher ed. The worlds of child care and early childhood education were foreign to me. I didn’t know the lingo or the layout. And, as I’d learn moments later, I didn’t have the slightest idea what it entailed to care for and engage babies and toddlers.
Fast forward six years, and now my favorite part of my work as an education journalist is meeting and writing about young children and their caregivers.
It wasn’t long after that program visit in Philly that I began to feel this way. Back then, few news outlets consistently published stories about the early years. EdSurge won grant funding to cover early childhood, and because no one on staff had covered the field before, we were given a sizable budget for travel. The idea was that I’d learn the beat in context. I went to early care and education programs all over the country — in homes, centers, schools and churches. I saw what an early learning environment looked like. I heard the sounds — oh, the glorious sounds of laughter and squeals of delight, the tears of a toy snagged unjustly or an unwanted nap. I smelled the smells. I noted the physicality of the job. I watched closely enough to realize that, as the children played — whether inside or outside, independently or in groups, structured or unstructured, real or imaginative — they were developing critical life skills.
From Utah to Ohio to New Jersey, I was filled with wonder during those initial months on the early childhood beat. I loved watching the way young children think and move about the world. I could not believe the depths of patience their teachers had. I puzzled over how, despite everything I learned about the significance of the early years for brain development and long-term success, child care was sorely underfunded, leaving families, educators and kids to figure it out for themselves.
It is one thing to write about babies’ brain development and skill acquisition, to cover the backwardness of the U.S. early care and education system, to report on the impossible choices parents are asked to make. It’s another to live it.
When I became pregnant with my first child in 2024, I told my husband that, as soon as we heard the baby’s heartbeat, I wanted to begin our child care search.
We hadn’t even told most friends and family when we began touring early learning centers in Denver. I expected to join long waitlists. I expected it would become our biggest or second-biggest expense, after housing. I’d been writing about these realities for years, after all.
But even I was shocked to be told, by more than one program director, that they likely wouldn’t have a slot for our son — who was due in spring 2025 — until 2027 or 2028.
And when we eventually decided to pursue a nanny share — in which our child and another child receive care from the same nanny in one of the family’s homes — I was prepared for a high-stakes hiring process. But I didn’t realize, until I got into it, just how difficult it would be to find someone with whom I felt I could entrust the single most precious thing in my life. Or how conflicted I would feel to be at my desk, writing about other child care arrangements for other people’s kids, when I could hear my own baby laughing and crying and babbling right upstairs.
Then there is the baby himself.
I think back to what I didn’t know and what I assumed back in 2019, and I shake my head. Little kids don’t just come online one day, around age 4 or 5, even though that’s how the education system in America treats them.
Some weeks into his life, I watched my son discover his hands. And then I watched him use those hands to reach for a bell that hung over his playmat. After he figured out how to touch it, he learned to grasp it, and after he learned to grasp it, he mastered ringing it. Now, at almost 7 months old, I see him use those hands to pick up board books and hold camping mugs and shake rattles and grab my face. He picks up foods like crusty bread and roasted carrots and strips of scrambled egg and brings them to his mouth to eat. I marvel.
I’ve heard experts explain for years that close caregiver relationships are what a child needs most in the first year of life. But in recent months, I’ve come to see firsthand how much comfort and encouragement and joy mine and my husband’s presence provide our son. I see him look to us for reactions. Now that he’s crawling, he follows us from room to room. Now that he’s reaching, I know when he wants to be held. Now that he’s been in a nanny share for some time, I know that he’s built a relationship with the nanny because he lights up when she arrives for the day.
I can’t say for certain that early childhood reporting has made me a better mom. Perhaps, in subtle ways, some kernels of knowledge have carried over. But I feel quite sure — at the very least hopeful — that motherhood will make me a more perceptive reporter, keenly aware of the stakes in early childhood and more empathetic to those the field touches.
On that subject, this is my last piece as a senior reporter for EdSurge. It has been a great run, with nearly 300 published stories over more than seven years. I’ve covered K-12 and early childhood education here with enthusiasm and commitment, even amid company mergers, a global pandemic, layoffs, and many seasons of change in my personal life.
The early childhood beat has grown up a bit in that time too, with many major newsrooms now devoting full-time positions to the field.
EdSurge will continue to cover early care and education after my time here is up. And in my next chapter as a journalist, so will I. I expect our paths will cross again and again.
