Parents Undocumented Status Matters For Children's Early Learning Summary

584 Words2 Pages

The chapter, “How Parents’ Undocumented Status Matters for Children’s Early Learning,” by Yoshikawa (2011) identifies two influential key factors on the effects of being undocumented to children’s achievement: parents’ work conditions and children’s access to center-based child care. Yoshikawa (2011) claims “Such child care features are important for the development of cognitive skills, such as motor and language skills, in early childhood” (p. 131). He further explains how “lower access to center care among children of undocumented has consequences for their cognitive skills” (Yoshikawa, 2011, p. 135). The thought-provoking questions that I came across were, what does the data tell us about these negative consequences on children’s cognitive skills and what are the positive consequences if these children were to have access to child care programs? Would this compensate for the lack of social and human capital that Willingham (2012) refers to in his work on how family wealth impacts learning? I would also like to know what strategies are used in teaching the curriculum in a child care setting. I believe Yoshikawa does a good job of presenting this claim throughout the reading but fails to provide this additional …show more content…

My personal view is that required documents may not be the single reason why undocumented parents are reluctant to allow their children in early access child care. Yoshikawa (2011) claims that “Undocumented parents are unlikely to use resources that require multiple forms of identification to obtain” (p. 129). However, I believe other equally important reasons could be the expense and the families cultural values. Given these factors, I believe that first, consideration needs to be given to the cost, access, and quality of any child care

Open Document