We all have opinions about children and what’s good for them, and our parents and communities have their own beliefs, too. As educators, how do we communicate effectively to families who may have misconceptions about how children learn and grow? This post is all about positive and meaningful communication with families. At the bottom you’ll find links to free resources that will be amazingly helpful to you.

You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below.



Megan Keyes

This is episode 7 and today I’m speaking to Megan Keyes about the gap that exists between early childhood educators and the general public regarding what we understand about child development and care, why it matters, and what we can do to align those understandings.

Megan works for the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

You can find links to free resources below and I can’t emphasize enough how much help these resources will be for any educator who communicates with parents about how children learn and grow.

Now to the interview.

Megan Keyes, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

We need the public behind us to gain government support

The Centre for Community Child Health has put a ton of time, money and effort into working out how best to communicate with the public about early childhood development and care. Why have you done this?

The Centre for Community Child Health has been looking at how to improve outcomes for children and families for over 20 years now. What we know from over 2 decades of work is that if we’re going to make a difference for children and children’s outcomes governments need to make a much greater investment in early childhood development. I’m talking about the very early years from conception onwards.

Prevention is better than cure

However, at the moment the biggest government investment goes into intervention or treatment. Of course, intervention and treatment are necessary but if we just continue down that path of pumping more and more money into the back end rather than the front end we’re never going to be able to turn things around for children. And the cost of our health system will become completely unsustainable.

But we’ve known all this for a really long time now and despite a lot of advocacy work from across the early years sector we haven’t really been able to make the big changes that we need to make. What we’ve come to realise is that if we’re going to change the way governments invest in children and families we need the general public to push for this, to get behind the advocacy efforts of the early years sector.

Up until now we haven’t been seeing a high level of public support for early childhood development, and we weren’t really sure why because the science seems so compelling to us. We couldn’t understand why it wasn’t so compelling for everyone else. Then we came across a strategic communications organization called The Frameworks Institute who are based in Washington.

Gaps between expert and public knowledge

After doing some work with Frameworks we realized that actually the problem was us. And when I say ‘us’ I mean the whole early years sector. We weren’t communicating about the science of early childhoo...