"Mommy, Will You Die Today When You Go to Work?"

• In Event: Women Education Scholars and Their Children's Schooling

Abstract

This paper describes stories of an a mother's journey in learning how to parent her youngest daughter, Gabriela (pseudonym), now 11 years old, whose early relational losses significantly impacted her brain development resulting in challenging behaviors including externalized aggression, hypervigilance and lengthy night terrors. Using detailed journal entries, (Author) describes the daily experiences of parenting a child suffering from relational loss and deep mourning, the emotions she and her family navigated, and the complexities and mindfulness the experience of parenting a traumatized child inserted into her professional thinking as an early childhood professor.

(Author) juxtaposes her diary entries with accounts of how her teaching—about typical and atypical children’s development through a course on children’s play—allowed her to have a space to share her stories with her students as authentic texts about the realities of working with challenging children. In her course, she strives to help her students to understand that during play, children tell their life story—showing others what has happened to them, how they feel about it, and what they need and want from the adults around them. She emphasizes how critical it is that they, as future early childhood professionals, have the emotional self-awareness and interactive regulatory capacity to both monitor and regulate their own behavior while also providing regulatory assistance to ameliorate any distress they observe among the children they are teaching.

(Author) draws on Nunez’s (2014) framework of intersectionality to discuss the complexities she grappled with in her personal and professional life simultaneously. For example, aware of her position as white and privileged, she faced many uncertainties in actualizing her desire to raise her two Latina adopted daughters to maintain a connection to their Central American heritage and culture as their memories of living in their birth country became powerful trauma triggers. Making her personal parenting narratives public texts in her graduate course while constructing weekly lesson plans that brought into view the role of play in children’s healing, she made visible for her students the honest challenges of aligning her professed values of being an educator for social justice with the exhaustion and overwhelm that defined her daily parenting experiences. Nunez’s framework on Multilevel Intersectionality provides a useful framework for describing the discoveries and important learning experiences she had navigating these tensions as an early childhood teacher educator.

Author

• Julie M. Nicholson, Mills College