Starting a Second Family
August 3, 2015
By Tricia Haley, Management and Program Analyst, Office of Child Care
As children in the 1980s, my siblings and I watched Sesame Street regularly. We loved it, it was educational, and it offered my mom a chance to redirect her curious toddlers so that she could take care of the various tasks that fill the lives of busy parents. I learned a lot from Sesame Street – letters and shapes, the basics of problem solving and friendship, and how to count to ten in both Spanish and French (growing up just south of the Canadian border, we had access to Canadian Sesame Street as well as the US version). Sesame Street has been a revolutionary educational tool and has taught children more than we could ever quantify.
But for all its successes, Sesame Street is a television program, and as such, it has limits. When the show ended at noon in our house, someone had to navigate all six of us kids through lunchtime – and as much as we loved him, it wasn’t going to be Grover.
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research highlights the virtues of Sesame Street as “the largest and least-costly [early childhood] intervention that’s ever been implemented” – an astounding success to say the least. While Sesame Street is being rightly celebrated as a valuable supplement for learning, though, I do wonder if the value of early childhood programs is getting lost in the discussion among some media outlets considering this study.
At the Office of Child Care, we work with States, Tribes, and Territories to fund child care for families in which parents are working, in school, or job searching. We’ve worked hard in recent years to offer parents high quality child care options in settings with providers who can engage with children and help develop their social and emotional health in their early years. But the most basic purpose of child care is to provide a safe space for children who need one.
Children learn real lessons about sharing and patience by interacting with other children. They can start to learn letters and numbers from Big Bird, but it takes an attentive adult who can engage in a story and answer questions to teach a child to read. And as much as Sesame Street can extoll the virtues of vegetables and encourage children to be active, there’s no substitute for a grown-up who cares enough to take the time to teach a child how to connect a bat and a ball.
Like a lot of educational programming, Sesame Street has the potential to teach children many lifelong lessons. Just as it has for decades, it complements all of the educational, social, and emotional lessons that children can learn in early care and education settings. Sesame Street is a valuable piece of the puzzle, but the picture isn’t complete without all of the real life people children interact with on a daily basis. All of our children deserve comprehensive early childhood education experiences – even Oscar the Grouch wouldn’t argue with that.
