What is the significance of the third letter C for CARE in ECCE? Is it only relevant in terms of care for children or also encompasses pedagogy and directs teaching practices? The dictionary meaning of ‘Care’ is looking after someone’s need for health and protection. I feel the care in ECCE is associated with more than looking after physical health needs, it could also be pointing us to practice caution, slowness, patience and mindfulness. As Carol Gaborone Murray says:

“The pedagogy of care dissolves the false dichotomy that there is a split between early education and care. In the past, caring may have been viewed as a minimum standard of keeping a child safe and clean, or as something anyone could do. In the emerging future, caring is viewed as an intentional teaching practice that connects us to another, and requires specialized knowledge about learning, growth, and human development.”   

Education, sadly over the years has been diminished and reduced to producing human machines, full of information and facts. We are running a mindless race towards development, growth and success - terms which are poorly understood as economic growth, consumerism and materialism. Thus the result of our limited worldview of growth and development is establishing formal schooling for young children, focusing on standardized curriculum, narrowing down the educational ideas to academic subjects and mugging facts, insensitive teaching methodologies, curbing natural curiosity and aliveness, behaviour patrol of young children and expecting an adult in the child’s body.   

Care in ECCE pertains to CAUTION, being cautious at each step while connecting with a child, being aware of the long-lasting impact of a small misstep and thus the importance of having a sound theoretical background about human growth and development and thus keep on learning before teaching. It is about going SLOW, at nature’s pace, pivoting on developmentally appropriate practices. Having PATIENCE with oneself in the journey of child’s growth and development, similar to a gardener who would not till a soil time and again to check the seeds. It requires us to check our expectations, beliefs about children and development, sources of this worldview and transform them if need be. It refers to being MINDFUL of a child's need for the spectrum of care and play-based programs.  

Thus ECCE is not just a profession but more about being a passionate well-wisher of humankind.