Warner – ecological framework  

The ecological framework is really important for looking at the returns from early childhood programs. And my concern with the way economists have come in and looked at the child development studies is that they fail to acknowledge the ecological framework. We need to think of person, place and context. A child is not a biological unit that you insert a little bit of early education and you get these huge results. And that is the way many of the economic are interpreting these investments in formal preschool: ‘bad parenting is the problem, formal preschool is the solution. We’ll give it three hours a day when you’re four years old and voila we’ll get returns of 17 to one returns. That’s crazy. 

A child is a human being. It’s born into a family. It’s not a biological unit, it’s a person. And it’s born into a family of parents who most likely work. They have a dual role in society of being caregivers and workers. And they live in a neighbourhood which may not even have any child care facilities. And they work outside their neigh, and they have long commutes and they have high stresses and all those stresses come back on to them, affect their parenting and affect that child’s development. Three-hour a day preschool when that baby hits four-years-old is not going to make very much difference.  

You need to begin investing early, and you need to think about the child nested in an ecological context. The child as a biological system, a human being, sitting inside a family as a social system, and that family is sitting inside a neighbourhood as a community system, and that neighbourhood is a part of a city, and that city is a part of a policy, a government that decides to care about children and value them as citizens, or to ignore them and treat them as only the private responsibility of their parents.