Nurturing Young Minds: The Power of Relationships and Ideal Learning Environments

Lisa Hamilton:

From the Annie E. Casey Foundation, I'm Lisa Hamilton and this is CaseyCast.

Today we're joined by Ellen Roche, a dedicated advocate for early childhood education and racial equity.

Ellen wears many hats. She co-leads the Trust for Learning, a philanthropic partnership supporting ideal learning environments in publicly funded early childhood settings. She's also pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience and cognitive science at the University of Maryland. Ellen's background in teaching, research and philanthropy gives her a unique view on creating ideal learning environments for young children.

We'll explore her work in infant and toddler development, discuss the intersection of research and practice, and delve into how we can build more inclusive, equitable learning opportunities.

Ellen, welcome to CaseyCast. We're excited to have you here today.

Ellen Roche:

Thank you so much, it's good to be here.

Lisa Hamilton:

I am excited that we get to talk about little kids today, I haven't had many podcasts where we get to talk about early childhood education. So, we should start this podcast talking about why early childhood is such an important developmental stage, and how that knowledge should shape how we think about early childhood education.

Ellen Roche:

Amazing. Thank you for starting with this, because I think when we say early childhood, different people bring different assumptions to that. So, I think the most important thing that I think about and I want people to think about is that children are born learning. They arrive to us proactively learning. They are curious, they're seeking experience, they're making meaning out of their experiences. They are not sponges, they are scientists. So, we think about the full spectrum of the early developmental period as being prenatal to roughly age 8.

So, that covers an incredible diversity of ways to support kids and families. So, it's also a really long and complicated developmental period when you think about being a philanthropist in that realm, or thinking about public policy, that is dozens of public funding streams that we can think about, from home-visiting programs and early HeadStart, to child care, to pre-K, to elementary school to afterschool programs. So, it is a real range and can be a puzzle in terms of policy and philanthropy.

Lisa Hamilton:

Well, we will. We're going to explore all of that, but I'm really intrigued by your notion that early learning actually goes up to age eight. So often we hear people talk about it really more like preschool, that it ends at 4 or 5 years old. And so, I'm really pleased to hear the way you have an expanded view of early childhood. And I love that you said kids are born learning. They're scientists.

I think that's a fascinating way of thinking about it, when we think of all the things they've got to learn, how to walk, and how to talk, and how to feed themselves, there's a lot, as you say, happening during that time. And as you said, it's spanning both a home environment, and child care, and preschool and elementary school. What makes for a quality early learning experience to support all that different development?

Ellen Roche:

So, I always say you only need one ingredient to have a learning environment. Anywhere we have a child, the child is learning, full stop. Whether we have intentionally designed that to be a learning environment or not. And you add an adult into the mix or you add an older peer, or really anybody else into that environment, and you have an educator. So, we think about early learning environments as being really anywhere that children are, and the quality piece is a whole other question. So, I always like to start with that, just reminding people children are proactively learning. If they are in a learning environment, it is a learning environment. So, what makes for a high-quality early learning environment for young children?

One of the ways that we've thought about quality indicators in a publicly funded system is something like child-adult ratios, or teacher ratios, or the degree that the educator has, whether they have a bachelor's degree as a binary indicator. And I do think that those are important quick snapshots of the capacity of the adults in a system, but they're not indicators of quality when we think about what we know about child development. So, to think about a vision of quality, I think we really want to turn to more of the developmental science side of things, which is what I'm working on in my Ph.D. So, we have so much evidence from developmental science that children learn proactively, they learn through exploration, they're naturally curious, they love to play, and play is a vehicle for learning. It's not something that should be a reward for learning, it's actually how kids learn.

And critically, and this is one of the things that I'm really interested in from a research perspective, that high quality early learning environments happen in these responsive present relationships with other people, with adults in their lives, caregivers, family members, educators of any kind. So, I really turn to the developmental science to think about quality, and so often the measures that we have don't at all get to that level.

So one, just to highlight a measure that I think is moving in that direction of really looking at the moment to moment experiences of children in these learning environments, an incredible researcher named Dr. Stephanie Curenton and her colleagues, she's based at Boston University, have developed a tool called the Assessing Socio-Cultural Equity Scale, or the Access tool. And often when we're observing in a learning environment, you have an adult walk in, usually a stranger to the learning environment, with a clipboard, or probably at this point an iPad.

And they're assessing these indicators. And one indicator of a high quality environment might be the amount of back and forth teacher talk, that interactive, serve and return, language rich environment that we want for young children. What the Access tool does is instead of just counting, okay, how much back and forth talk was there in the classroom, they are looking at a deeper level at the individual experiences of children. So, do Black children receive the same level of high engagement>

So, I think that's where we need to move in terms of actual practical measures of quality, both much more individualized, more moment-to-moment level. And I'll say, as much as we need the quantitative tools, when you walk into what we call an ideal learning environment, it actually feels different. So, I also think we can trust our intuition at some level, and parents know that when they're looking for child care, teachers know that.

When I was interviewing at schools, you walk in and you get a feel, and I don't think we should ignore that. I study emotion, and I think that the feeling of a school is really incredibly important, and we can't always capture that quantitatively.

Lisa Hamilton:

That's fantastic. One of the most powerful things you said is that children learn in relationships. And we do work across quite a developmental continuum at Casey, from prenatal through adolescence and beyond, but certainly through adolescence, which ends around age 24. And over and over again, we are told through the neuroscience, it teaches us that babies, children, adolescents, they all grow and learn best in relationship. And I don't think there's any way we can legislate this, but in so many ways love is in there. We don't use the word love, but it is that deep care that I think any child or young person feels from an adult in their life that helps them trust, that opens the possibility of growth. And so, it is just so warming to hear you say that relationship piece, because I think like you said, we often look at learning environments and are picking them apart in all kinds of quantitative ways, but it's that relationship, that trust that really is what unlocks growth for young people. So, thank you for lifting that up.

Ellen Roche:

Yeah, it is so important, and you're pointing out something that I think is a real opportunity for people who are funders, are in the policy space to find ways to measure how families feel, how educators feel, whether there is a feeling that my child will genuinely be loved up on in this learning environment.

We put out a report a couple of years ago that is a compendium of existing early childhood measures and did a crosswalk with how they align with these nine principles of ideal learning environments that we use as our lens, and one of those of course being relationships. And one of the recommendations coming out of that report, which my co-director, Chrisanne Gayl, led with a council of experts in this realm across the country, is the idea that we should really be asking parents for their feedback on the quality of a program.

So, that feeling of a parent when they walk in the door, especially parents from all backgrounds, parents who don't speak English, parents of color, how did they feel about the quality? And lift that up as a critically important indicator of the actual program quality. There is some evidence that families on average from lower income backgrounds may choose smaller home-based family, child care centers over center-based options, even if the quality rating is not the same. And the evidence that those parents provide in terms of why they choose those programs is that they believe their child will be cared for more. It's critically important, and we do not put it at the top of the list.

Lisa Hamilton:

It is. I am a woman of color, I have a daughter of color, and I have seen the dramatic difference between how she was cared for and treated in a Montessori program she went to when she was really young, to how she might have experienced educators as she got older and were not as nurturing to her. So, I certainly, from personal experience understand that. You mentioned part of the high quality environment was about cultural competence, and making sure they're equitable environments. Could you say a little bit more about what it takes to create spaces where all children and all families feel welcome?

Ellen Roche:

So, the first principle of the principles of ideal learning environments is racial linguistic ability inclusion. And I think the aspirations that we have in this country toward true inclusion and truly equitable experiences for all children are still so far from what children experience on a daily basis. So, I don't know that we actually know what it will take. I think we have some of the really critically important foundational ingredients that are not yet in place. One of those, as we know from a lot of research, is that just having educators who look like you, who speak your language, who are from your community is critically important. So, investing in the early childhood workforce who are already disproportionately women and women of color, investing in their capacity to stay in the profession is one really, really important way that we know is backed by research in terms of a foundational input in the system.

I think raising people's awareness about our own internalized biases, which is a lot of the work that people have engaged in voluntarily or not since 2020, is critically important. But I think, and this is something we talk about in our racial equity work at the Trust, that we don't really have yet a set of best practices for what racial equity pedagogy looks like. And I think there are many other things, but the most important, the foundational thing is supporting specifically for racial equity, supporting people of color to lead the way. That is the number one ingredient. If we're not starting there, I don't think we can figure out the rest of it.

Lisa Hamilton:

Casey supported the development of the first Educare Center in Georgia. Educare is another model that your organization lifts up as a high quality learning environment model. And I've had the pleasure of visiting there many times to see the work that they do. They're embedded in an elementary school, and so when you say early learning happens to age 8, it is wonderful to see this ability for an early learning center facilitate the transition to elementary school as such a place-based way. But one of the novel things I think they’re doing there is they are intentional about having male educators of color in early learning settings, which you talked about what the child care workforce looks like now.

But to enable these young children to have warm, nurturing experiences with men of color so early in their lives, they view that as just really an important part of what they’re trying to do there. Just curious about your reaction to that, and if you know other programs that are trying to do innovative things around the early childhood workforce like that.

Ellen Roche:

Yes, that is such a great example and question, and I will build on the Educare examples to highlight the work of Jamal Berry, who runs DC’s Educare program, which is again, a absolutely beautiful place to visit. I’ve had the real joy of visiting there and bringing folks there. They are set up as a demonstration site for policymakers to say, “Look what’s possible when we invest.” So, Jamal and his team are just incredibly welcoming and so good at telling the story of this. But Jamal is a man who’s been in early childhood for a long time, and he is really invested in this work of lifting up male Black male educators, and I think it’s so important, and it’s not something that I can say I have a lot of expertise on myself, but the gender disparities in early childhood are-

Lisa Hamilton:

Vast.

Ellen Roche:

… profound. So on the one hand, it’s like I think we want to center the voices of women and women of color who’ve been doing this work for hundreds of years, uncompensated or under-compensated. I think that’s important. But then what is the broader vision of who gets to be an early childhood educator, and do we value this profession? And we want to lift up this role in our country as something that is one that people aspire to and want to get into, and are in it because they love working with children, but also are revered, and respected, and compensated. And for so many people who are working as early childhood educators today, they have all the first ingredients. They love working with children, they’re great at it, they are incredibly devoted, but we are not really supporting them as a society. So, I would love to see the workforce be more diverse in the future. So yeah, all kids have educators who look like them, and have a diverse array of educators.

Lisa Hamilton:

That’s awesome. Wonderful. Well, we clearly get why early childhood is important, but everyone doesn’t. I’m curious how you help a range of people, whether parents, or funders, or policy makers understand the importance of this time in a young person’s life.

Ellen Roche:

One piece of it is actually myth busting, because there are so many pervasive myths about young children that people still believe, that are either potentially racist, sexist, just based on really old science that has been completely let go of. One example is this idea that I think we've mostly moved past, but that because we don't remember our early childhoods, that it's this “who cares what happens during that?” Because it's like, yeah, they're not going to remember this. If you're 2, it's fine. The opposite is true. These early years are foundational in terms of all the systems of a development that are coming online.

The myth that early childhood educators are basically babysitters. They're still paid typically like babysitters, so this is a pervasive myth that is driving policy. And related to that, this idea that child care or early childhood education should be cheap or free because we have been raised in a country where women do it out of the goodness of our hearts for hundreds of years, because we literally had to legally.

But I think on the more proactive and hopeful side of the messaging, and I think we're seeing this work in terms of policy, I really am excited myself by the brain science, and I think getting people excited about the brain science is really helpful, because it demystifies so much of what we experience as humans. And there's so much cool science that has not really made it into the public discourse, or if it has, it's made it in, in only the most headline ways.

But even for adults, when you tell people that, okay, so early childhood is this sensitive and amazing period of neuroplasticity, adolescence is too, I'm interested in adolescence, although I'm not in that world right now. And I love that you said that it ends at 25, which I recently learned and it blew my mind, and also explained some things about my own development.

Lisa Hamilton:

It's very illuminating. Yes, I too have become a brain science geek over the years. It is fascinating.

Ellen Roche:

Yes, I got myself off on a tangent, but when you tell people about the research on pregnancy and neuroplasticity, or parenting and neuroplasticity, or caregiving and neuroplasticity, whether you are the one who carries the child, our brains change when we interact with children. So, I think the brain science is so cool, and goes such a long way toward helping people understand the magic of development and what's possible for people

Lisa Hamilton:

One myth bust that I'd love to hear you talk about, as a foundation that does a lot of work around adolescence and has invested heavily in adolescent brain science, there has sometimes been an over promotion maybe, of early childhood, in the sense that everything we need to do happens by the time they're five, and children are a foregone conclusion after that. That there's no further investment needed, there's no more growth and development that happens. We know that's absolutely wrong, but has the early childhood field done anything to try to dispel that myth? None of us give up on our own children at five, but I think some people have used early childhood science to, in some ways, build a narrative in that way.

Ellen Roche:

I'm so glad you brought this up, and I feel that I sometimes fall into this, or I see myself approaching that myth where I almost say things like, "The first five years are the most important," and we reify the very earliest years, and implicitly we're saying, "And after that-"

Lisa Hamilton:

Who cares?

Ellen Roche:

Not at all. And I don't know that we have the messaging quite right on this, but one of the big challenges, especially having come from more of the K-12 space and now being in early childhood, is that even as advocates, and as funders, and as policy people, we are in our own silos working on these things. If you're thinking about reaching the children who've been historically most disinvested in, you're thinking about big programs like Head Start and Early Head Start, and those are very specific, but their own policy opportunities and limitations. We do a lot of work in that area, led by my colleague, Toscha Blalock, at the Trust. And when you're thinking about middle and high schoolers, you actually have a much narrower range of policy intervention opportunities, but they're much bigger, and you have a bigger chorus working on them, I think.

So, that's one challenge. I don't know how to fix it, but those of us who care about development, trying to at least get out of our own way a little bit in these behind the scenes silos of policy and philanthropy, or even if we're in those silos, having some shared messaging around what's possible as humans. And so, one of the ways that we are trying to talk about this, and I don't think we've got it quite right, but really emphasizing that human development is this thing that's unique to our species. It happens over our entire lifespan, and it happens in relationship. And so, we think a lot about how to support educators who are adults of some level, some of them are probably still in their late adolescence if we're counting that up to 25, and the adult development that is possible when we get together and figure out what we want for our children.

So, I think we need to be talking more about species level development and what makes humans cool, and we're cool at all parts of our lifespan, and we have our roles to play as we go through these different periods. But I think that's part of it is more who are we as humans? What do we want for ourselves? And babies are adorable, so that also does not hurt the early childhood advocacy.

Lisa Hamilton:

Absolutely. Well, there's been lots of news these days about the child care crisis, and the lack of access, and affordability and quality issues around child care. Talk to us about the interplay between child care, early childhood education, are they the same thing? Are they different things? And as we try to solve this child care crisis, how do we need to be thinking about that in the context of learning, not just care?

Ellen Roche:

Yeah. So, this is such a conundrum for our country right now, and the language often obscures I think, what's really important. So, we tend to use the phrase early learning environment to refer really to any environment where children are, but particularly publicly funded early learning environments. And child care is, well, child care can encompass a range of those publicly funded contexts. But really what child care means for parents and families on a day-to-day basis, of course child care is necessary throughout development, but especially in those first couple of years of life, it is so expensive, so hard to access, and even if you can access it, really hard to access those high quality early learning environments in a child care setting.

So there's this touch point in developmental science, the Bronfenbrenner, Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model, and if you're listening to this, feel free to Google it. There are these beautiful images of the individual child nested in the family as the closest ring of development. And then one layer out, you have the community, and maybe the school, and then another layer out you have some policy contexts that are going to influence that child's development. And then the furthest layer out, you have these macro forces, like COVID, and climate change, and racism. So, I think the relationship between child care and development when we think from that really interconnected perspective is that if families can't afford high quality child care, it influences all of the rings of all those influences on development.

So for the child, if they don't have access to high quality child care, that might mean that they're in a lower quality child care setting. So, they're possibly missing out on those rich, interactive, exploratory play-based experiences that they could have if they had a high quality child care setting. If they're in a child care setting where their educators are undercompensated, which they are very likely to be, because all early childhood educators, especially in the child care context, are dramatically undercompensated, then they are being cared for and taught by educators who are likely to be chronically stressed, likely to turn over.

Almost half of those educators themselves will rely on public subsidies. So, all the science says that chronic stress is bad for people, yet we have designed these systems to ensure that all the people within them are navigating chronic stress on a daily basis. So, that impacts children, it impacts educators. And then if a family can't find child care, we have tons of research on what that means for women's employment, for closing wealth gaps, intergenerational effects of not having child care. So, child care specifically, I think is this fulcrum policy, particularly before kindergarten, when so many families, depending on your state, have no access to publicly funded child care of any kind. It's the kind of investment that can really change the trajectory of people's lives in this country, but change our country. So, I think we have to be talking about it that way.

Lisa Hamilton:

So, why don't we shift and talk about what your organization, the Trust for Learning does, to try to address so many of these issues we have talked about, and strengthen early learning environments?

Ellen Roche:

So, Trust for Learning is a philanthropic partnership. So, we were started by two Montessori moms who both had small family foundations, and their children were in this beautiful, private Montessori program. And at their foundations they were being approached and asked to support programs for children that looked nothing like the high quality environments that their children had. And so, that gap, that question in their minds around why are funders being asked to support what often looked like more authoritarian, more overly academic, more restrictive learning environments for lower income children and children of color is the way that the Trust started.

And we are now a small but mighty band of philanthropic funders who are united by this vision of racial equity and inclusion, and these developmentally informed early learning environments that we call ideal learning environments, broken down very simply into these nine key principles, play, relationships, racial equity, the importance of adult development, as I mentioned, the importance of the physical learning environment as the third teacher, and a few others.

So, we're really banded together by this mission and vision. And the way that we work is really at two levels that are pretty interconnected, and we've evolved this theory of change over now almost 15 years, but we make direct investments in learning environments around the country. So, we are giving grants to Head Start centers, to pre-K programs, to child care programs as they work, because they are interested in moving more toward this vision of ideal learning environments. So, wherever they're starting from, we can give them money to train their educators, purchase new supplies, renovate a classroom or a learning environment. So, just moving toward these aspirations that they also share, but don't always have the resources to create.

And then we work to change the policy environments that surround those learning environments, because we have so many gaps in policy that if we change them could allow all children, or many, many more children to access these ideal learning environments much more quickly.

So, our work spans working directly with programs around the country and working directly with policymakers at a state level, and here in DC where I live, at the federal level. And then, the way we tend to work, so we make direct investments, we also do a ton of movement building work. We bring people together from around the U.S., from around different kinds of contexts and settings, to show up at policy tables and build those skills and the confidence to say, "Well, here's what I think should change in policy." And then the Trust really acts as a megaphone to amplify that co-created policy agenda through our work.

Lisa Hamilton:

That is fantastic. Well, I'm curious what kind of guidance you give to other funders who want to do this work. We know there are lots of funders who are interested in early education, where do we still need more funding, or research, or expertise to drive our country forward towards this vision?

Ellen Roche:

Yeah. So, I think different funders have different priorities based on their own restrictions, but I think actually this connective tissue between local work and policy work is so important. And often funders fund either in one area or the other. Often sometimes we'll see local funders who are giving extraordinary amounts and providing amazing support to local programs, and then we'll see national funders, or sometimes local funders, who are really doing the policy work but don't really have strong connections to communities who are day-to-day navigating the policy implications. So, I really think it's that connective tissue that we're trying to do at the Trust that's so important.

And I'll share just to highlight a colleague of mine, Alicia Linear, who runs a beautiful Reggio Emelia Head Start program in St. Louis with her community. So, every day Alicia is running this truly spectacular place for children. Her philosophy is that if you're a young child, you walk into a classroom and it's yours. It is designed for you, you have a right to beauty, you have a right to freedom, and everything about the learning environment should support all of that. So, Alicia is doing this incredible day-to-day work as an educator, a leader, a mom, a friend. She is just like powerhouse day-to-day, and then she's also this brilliant storyteller, policy advocate and community organizer.

So, she's bringing parents and educators together to City Hall and to the State House. She's showing up in DC with her educators to come to the Head Start network to show up and talk to policy makers. And Alicia does have plenty of formal credentials, but I think the most powerful expertise that she brings, and the reason she's such a powerful voice for policy change, is her daily experience. She is creating an ideal learning environment in a Head Start context, in a community that has been systemically disinvested in for many years. She's Black, she talks a lot about the Black community where she lives. So, from my perspective, it is more important that Alicia's voice is at these policy tables than mine is. So, funders can help make those connections, funders can meet people in communities and find out what do you actually need to have change? And are you interested in talking to policy makers?

Many people are already doing that, but funders have so much power and can make those connections to change who sits at policy tables.

Lisa Hamilton:

That's awesome. We've talked a lot about communities that have faced lots of adversity and families who faced a lot of adversity, and early childhood being such a powerful tool to try to overcome challenges, or create a great start for young children who might have families who face challenges. Your organization does a lot of research in this space. What kinds of adversity are you studying, and what are you seeing that can be helpful in getting children, even from some of the most challenging backgrounds, on the right foot from the beginning?

Ellen Roche:

Yeah. So, there has been this rise in research on indicators of adversity, which are so various, and often show up in clusters in terms of experiencing racism, or experiencing disinvestment. And I am most interested as a researcher, and I think at the Trust we're most interested too in thinking about structural drivers of adversity. So, things like racism, entrenched limited access to opportunity, food deserts. We don't necessarily work on food deserts, but things like that, tax policy, these big macro level drivers. So, in that Bronfenbrenner nested group of circles, the things out further toward the edges, because these are things outside of family's control. No individual parent can take on most-

Lisa Hamilton:

Food deserts. Right.

Ellen Roche:

Yeah, exactly. And what I worry about, and part of why I decided to do a Ph.D., is that I think so often we study interventions that are individual level or school level, and these larger forces are flooding families with challenges. And we're like, "Well, let's see, if we teach this parent how to be a better parent for three hours in a randomized control trial, whether their child is going to graduate from high school-

Lisa Hamilton:

Outcomes, yep. We often say you cannot program yourself out of the problems we have. We've got to work systemically, we've got to work on policy.

Ellen Roche:

Yeah. So, I'm really interested in some of these policy interventions, and there's so much interesting research happening right now on that level. So, the Baby's First Years project is an ongoing-

Lisa Hamilton:

We invested in that.

Ellen Roche:

I was going to say, I thought maybe you all had. Yeah.

Lisa Hamilton:

We did, which for listeners became the foundational research around the expansion of the child tax credit. It helped us understand how much just a few hundred dollars a month helped to stabilize low-income families lives so that they can put healthy food on the table, buy back-to-school supplies, make sure the rent is paid. So yes, we know how important studies like that are.

Ellen Roche:

Yeah. So, those kinds of things are also things, as you all have, that funders can help get a pilot off the ground, can help do some of that research that then maybe build into a larger study. So, I'm really interested in those structural intervention research projects that then become the basis for policy.

And I'm running a study now where we are looking at what's called neural synchrony between parents and young children, and this is a very new world of research, but basically, we know that our brains synchronize to some extent under different conditions. And there is some evidence that stress changes those patterns of parent-child synchrony. But it's still all very new, it's still all fairly mysterious. And one of the things that I found in looking at literature reviews is that the vast majority of the people who've been in these neural synchrony studies are white, and are middle to high income.

And there are very, very few studies that even include families of color, and even include a range of families from socioeconomic backgrounds.

Lisa Hamilton:

Can you explain what neural synchrony is? Is it the child takes on the stress patterns of the parent? What does that mean?

Ellen Roche:

So, there is a much larger literature on synchrony between caregivers and children outside of the brain. The brain research is brand new, but from the other synchrony research people have looked at facial expression synchrony. So if I smile, do you smile? People have looked at heart rate synchrony, so do our heart rates go up and down together, or not? Lots of other different biological, and affective, and behavioral indicators of synchrony. And that body of research is much, much, much better established, and there is decent evidence that stress can disrupt very positive parent-child synchrony. But it's complicated, because if you are a parent who is deeply stressed, we probably don't want the child to synchronize with you. So, I believe that asynchrony, or moments when parents and children are not in sync, are probably very healthy and adaptive. But all that variability gets lost in the big studies that exist.

And now we're trying to bridge that synchrony research into the brain, which is what we're trying to do in our study. So, it's the cutest thing ever because we put these little brain hats on kids. We have two to six year olds in our studies, and then their parent wears an identical brain hat, and they play games together, they talk to each other, and all the while we're recording continuous neural activity from the scalp. And we're focused on the prefrontal cortex, which we know is expanding rapidly during these years, supporting executive function, emotional regulation, language supports, all kinds of stuff. And what we're looking for is does the brain activity in particular regions between parents and children move up and down together, is the very, very, very basic question.

And what I'm attempting to do is first have a much more inclusive sample. So, we've worked with about 60 families so far.The majority are families of color, a real range of socioeconomic backgrounds, a decent range of home languages spoken, just for the sake of let's have data that's actually representative, and maybe we'll come to the same conclusions, maybe we won't.

But the other thing we're trying to do is again, look within families, because every family has their own rhythm that works for them, and try to figure out what are the range of things that might trigger this neural synchrony across families? And they may not be the same for every family. That's the working hypothesis, but all at this point theoretical because we are still collecting data.

Lisa Hamilton:

Well, there's obviously still lots to learn, even though we already know so much about early childhood. And we are grateful to the Trust for Learning, for championing, investing in and educating the rest of us about this work. As a final question, just could you give me a couple of sentences on where you think we need to go in this country around early learning, what do we need to be working on together?

Ellen Roche:

So, I think the adults in the room at this moment in the country have a real opportunity to come together and say, "You know what? What if we centered children in policy?" And of course, that's child care, that is investing in public pre-K, that is expanding all these programs that we know are so important, but it's also climate policy, it's peace and justice work. It is really reclaiming, I think, our vision for what is possible in the United States for future generations. That's what my parents and grandparents did, that's what all of our ancestors have done, and we've been struggling, and we have the capacity as adults to come together and say, "We want something different." So, I think that's the short answer for the short term.

Lisa Hamilton:

I love that too. If we could center children in policy, a really amazing country. Thank you so much for that vision. And thank you so much for joining us today, Ellen, and all the amazing work that the Trust for Learning does. And thank you to our listeners as well.

If you liked our conversation, please recommend us on your favorite podcasting app. To learn more about Casey and the work of our guest, check out our show notes at aecf.org/podcast. Until next time, I wish all of America's kids and all of you a bright future.