three ideals of Code of ethical conduct and statement of commitment, NAEYC

I choose the 3 following ideals I would like to pay much attention to and follow. Of course all the others are also important, but these three are the most important ones with my understandings to the present situation.

1. Ideals to children:

“ I-1.5—To create and maintain safe and healthy settings that foster children’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development and that respect their dignity and their contributions. “. For 99% of Chinese parents, they focus on children’s cognitive development much more than social, emotional and physical development. Especially for emotion of a child, it is not usually mentioned. If a child cry, the adult will stop it quickly and focus on how not let him cry, like distract his attention, bribe or punish. The children learn to hid his own feelings from very young, they find out it is not proper to cry, to express their emotion. Sometimes even if he is very happy for something, the adults will teach him not to be proud, and tell them there are higher goal to achieve, so the children learn to be not satisfied with everything he has, and always achieve more. It will cause competition, greedy and other problems. So setting a balanced environment for a child is very important.

2. Ideal to family:

 I-2.5—To respect the dignity and preferences of each family and to make an effort to learn about its structure,culture, language, customs, and beliefs. This draws my attention because we really should respect each family’s dignity and preferences. With the urbanization of China, people especially the peasants start to move out of their hometown and start to live in the cities. The problems come along with it. With limited knowledge and skills, they have to choose simple or physical work to do. In China, the beliefs that the brain workers take a higher social level and be paid higher than physical workers have a long tradition. The education of the children from these new immigrants to city is a big and urgent problem now. Even the state spends a lot on it, but it’s far more than enough and the big problem is still there. The biggest problem is the society has no respect to these families. The main stream of the city regard them as enemy or try to isolate them from their own circle. You can imagine for the children in the new immigrants families, they live in an unfair and isolated world because their parents’ social status. I do hope this will be changed somehow in the near future.

3. Ideal to Community and Society

 I-4.2—To promote cooperation among professionals and agencies and interdisciplinary collaboration among professions concerned with addressing issues in the health, education, and well-being of young children, their families, and their early childhood educators. China really needs this idea and practice. I have heard about the cooperation among all sectors for a long time, but there are always policy barriers, people from different sectors hold different powers and it seems difficult to balance and cooperate with other people from different sectors for the healthy development of children. I give an example here, if you want to deliver a baby in a hospital but your Residence Permit is not local, you have to travel to your Residence place for collecting some permissions no matter how far the hometown is. It’s the same for a child whose residence permit is local when entering the primary school. I hope everyone in China will pay attention to the problems and do something for it.

NAEYC. (2005, April). Code of ethical conduct and statement of commitment. Retrieved May 26, 2010, from
http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/PSETH05.pdf