Growing Up in Child Care: A Case for Quality Early Education

High-quality child care has proven effective in longitudinal studies of the subsequent intellectual, emotional, and social growth of children. Ben Mardell has proven this too in his unique history of children who grew up at the Oxford Street Day Care Cooperative where he was the afternoon preschool teacher. Combining compelling interviews and photos with his own research at Harvard and classroom experience, Ben has produced a book that is at once a scholarly study and one of the most visually and verbally eloquent books available about the education of young children. By looking closely at the experiences of one group in a high-quality center, he offers concrete data from children and parents about what child care entails, a model for child-care teachers for building an effective classroom, and an image of what is possible and a call to action.