How to keep up with the business of early childhood development

You may want to learn more about how technology can help new parents (or not), how governments are spending on early childhood education and care, or the science behind how babies’ brains develop. There are plenty of resources, and below is a selection that helped inform our field guide on the business of early childhood development.

Reports

• Bridgespan/Pritzker Children’s Initiative: Achieving Kindergarten Readiness for All Our Children: A Funder’s Guide to Early Childhood Development from Birth to Five

• Brookings: Leapfrogging inequality: Remaking education to help young people thrive

• Brookings: Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children

• Center for Childhood Creativity: Reimagining School Readiness

• Early Learning Lab: NextGen Technology: Insights and Recommendations to Support the Parents of Children Ages 0–3

• The Lancet: Advancing Early Childhood Development: from Science to Scale

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Parenting Matters

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education

• OECD: The Power and Promise of Early Learning

• OECD: Starting Strong

• Omidyar Network: Big Ideas, Little Learners

• Promise Venture Studio: ECD Venture Index

• World Bank: Promising Approaches in Early Childhood Development

Researchers, initiatives, and other groups

• Cambridge University Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development & Learning

• Capita Social

• EU Alliance for Investing in Children 

• Early Childhood Development Action Network 

• Early Childhood Matters

• Early Childhood Workforce Initiative

• The Early Learning Lab

• First Five Years Fund

• Harvard University Center for the Developing Child 

• International Step by Step Association 

• Promise Venture Studio

• University of London Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development’s BabyLab

• University of Minnesota Institute for Child Development 

• World Bank’s Early Childhood Development topic page

• Yale University Infant and Child Development Labs

• Zero to Three

Videos

• Keynote on the science of early childhood development by Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

• Keynote on the impact of toxic stress by Nadine Burke Harris, California’s first Surgeon General and founder of the Center for Youth Wellness

• The linguistic genius of babies TED talk by Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington

• What do babies think? TED talk by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley

Books

• Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children by Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh Pasek

• The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel

• Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool by Emily Oster

• The Gardner and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik (here’s why I think if you are going to read just one book, it should be this one)

• The Whole Brain Child by Dan Siegel