Nurturing Space
The Ecology of Early Childhood Facilities
Nurturing Space: The Ecology of Early Childhood Facilities is Carl Sussman’s contribution to the National Children’s Facilities Network’s Making Space series of thought leadership papers.
Nurturing Space applies lessons drawn from ecological and developmental psychology to the challenge of designing high-quality early care and education (ECE) facilities. Young children often spend half their waking hours in these centers. Sussman, one of the Network’s founders, argues that the most compelling case for investing in these built and natural environments is the positive effect these settings can have on a child’s development.
Addressing the Unforgiving Economics of Caring for Children
Nurturing Space highlights the dramatic underinvestment in the physical environments we create for young children. It also reminds readers, however, that the underlying economics of early childhood development also undermines other critical factors that drive quality and positive child outcomes:
Workforce: To foster warm, positive adult-child relationships, the ECE workforce must be appropriately compensated and provided benefits and professional development opportunities.
Organizations: Tight budgets and slim operating margins of many ECE programs often results in sacrifices to important organizational functions, but the highest quality providers tend to have robust human resource capacity, financial management, marketing, quality control, and overall organizational leadership.
Family Focused: Embracing partnership with and support of families bolsters program quality and developmental outcomes for children. Programs should be intentional about and devote resources to a high level of parent engagement.
Facilities: A program’s physical environment directly contributes to program quality and can hinder or bolster child outcomes and working conditions. Spacious, age-appropriate, and diverse physical elements to indoor and outdoor classrooms and other program spaces directly impact program effectiveness.
Faced with scarce resources, ECE providers invariable cut costs by settling for inadequate facilities. As a result, children regularly spend their days in physical settings where minimal regulatory requirements and affordable rent are the overriding considerations.
Connecting Research and Practice: Finding Evidence
Nurturing Space reports on the School for Young Children (SYC), a nationally accredited campus-based preschool at Saint Joseph College in Connecticut. When SYC relocated to a new facility, the program dramatically improved, especially adult-child interactions and workforce job satisfaction. Researchers identified some of the physical attributes that produced these positive results:
These are just a few of the features that transform generic physical space into settings that support early childhood development and enhance the workplace environment for early educators.
Space – Each classroom had one-third more space, creating a more orderly and less crowded ambiance.
Better-defined activity areas – Larger classrooms, in turn, meant each teacher could accommodate more and better-defined activity areas so that children have more choices and are less likely to distract other children involved in adjacent activity areas.
Windows – Moving from a basement to first floor space meant each classroom has a wall of large windows, lifting everyone’s mood and providing an essential connection with nature, time-of-day, variable weather conditions, and seasonal changes.
Bathrooms – Instead of a single shared bathroom in the old center, in the new site each classroom has its own bathroom, fostering children’s self-reliance and eliminating frequent interruptions caused by teachers coming and going to accompany children needing the facilities.
Nurturing Centers: Applying Ecological Psychology
Sussman’s paper draws on the work of ecological psychologists, like Uri Bronfenbrenner, James J. Gibson, and Roger G. Barker, to illustrate how the physical environment can:
Nurture self-regulated learning through behavioral settings that afford and invite a child’s:
attention,
exploration,
manipulation,
elaboration, and
imagination
Provide staff with rewarding work environments, and
Serve as a source of support for working parents.
