Valuing Intuition in Early Care
by Dr. Emily A. Snowden
A young child uses their hands to cover their eyes.
I have said many times to a variety of stakeholders in the field of early care and education (ECE): “I, like you, am here out of a deep reverence for the uninterrupted humanity that we have the privilege to witness and protect in early learning spaces.”
We all know that this is why we show up to early care–to protect and nurture these beautiful moments of individual growth, community, laughter, togetherness, humanity. We know the power of seeing an individual child go from screaming “Mine!” to cooperating and sharing.
There are many things we want our children to do, be, know, feel, and internalize. In ECE, we are increasingly determining that what we really want to see children “learn” in early childhood tends to boil down to skills like self-regulation and agency. While the journey to these psychological skills looks different for each child, we know that when caregivers can ‘scaffold’ young children in developmentally appropriate ways, they each can learn to manage difficult emotions and impulses, coordinate responses that consider and keep the other members of their community safe, verbalize their needs, and advocate for themselves. These skills not only “ready” them for compulsory schooling, but are important aspects of preparing children for democratic citizenship, along with critical thinking and empathy.
However, because these moments of humanity are deeply subjective shapeshifters, we struggle to include them in the manageable, objective, “clean” data we collect about ECE quality, outcomes, and skills like “school readiness.” When well-meaning people collect this kind of “objective” data on early learning environments for the purpose of research and evaluation, it is supposed to say:
“Yes–we have determined with this objective evidence that this early learning environment and every underpaid individual working here robustly supports each individual child in all aspects of learning and development.”
However, when we only use this kind of approach to research and evaluation, we overemphasize “technical-rational” aspects of learning and end up losing many important (albeit subjective and “messy”) bits of humanity that always, every single time, unavoidably fill up early learning spaces. This is why no matter how great we think our checklists, our assessments, or our studies are, we end up frustrated, constantly trying to figure out why many of these deeply subjective outcomes evade our measurements and are so darn hard to report on!
Yet, whether we capture and communicate them well or not, these little flashes of magic, where we teach a young child to regain control of their breath and really choose with consideration for others what their next interaction with the world will be, these pieces of the experience cannot continue to slip through the cracks in our current measurements and definitions of quality. Why? Because individuals providing direct care to young children do not have the choice to exclude these ever-emerging and ever-subjective aspects of humanity from their consideration. They must face them head on, with minimal processing time, every single day.
There is a particularly important piece of our humanity that we tend to overlook and thus undervalue in ECE and beyond. I specifically bring it forward today because despite the fact that we ignore it, we expect to see it intact in both children and their caregivers. Though seemingly mystical, it is quite straightforward: intuition.
In this psychological phenomenon–where the lines between thinking and feeling are blurred–our inner world inexplicably tells us something about our outer world. While this shapeshifter might come in the form of an epiphany, a reassurance, a knowing, or a warning, it is a part of our humanity, and thus a part of our children’s experience in this world. As such, it deserves our care, consideration, and valuation.
What is Intuition?
Intuition is a funny concept–somewhat mystical, but also very visceral, very “real.” While seemingly an esoteric subject, the definition of intuition is:
“the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference” or “quick and ready insight.”
Because by nature intuition relates to the mind or psyche, here explanations from the field of psychology help us understand more about how intuition operates as a part of our humanity, particularly the work of Swiss psychologist and psychotherapist Carl G. Jung.
Jung’s theories were defining for early psychology, and after his ‘split’ with Freud shifted to focus on acknowledging and embracing the “whole” psychological experience of each individual. While this work was developed through technical-rational thought (“science”), it was also informed and shaped by other schools of thought, such as philosophy, anthropology, alchemy, storytelling, and spirituality (including various organized religions, occult practices, systems of beliefs, and more). Many of Jung’s theoretical terms, like “introvert” and “extrovert,” moved beyond the medical field and took on meaning in the ‘mainstream.’
Intuition had a particularly important place in Jung’s theories, where he highlighted it as one of his four psychological “types.” This is because intuition, he said, plays a pivotal role in piecing together the puzzle that is “consciousness.” According to Jung, intuition is part of a “whole” individual, who has to embrace and balance the “rational” and “irrational” parts of themselves.
In the “rational” mind, we do our thinking and feeling. This is the part of us that remembers things, puts them in lists, keeps them organized, and makes sure they are communicable to other people. Sensation and intuition, on the other hand, made up the “irrational mind.” This part of ourselves, unlike the “rational” part, is where we do our “data collection” or information gathering.
Each of these pieces play important roles in making up the “big picture,” working together to coordinate information that is taken in from the outer world and make sense of it in the inner. When we lay them out next to each other we can see that “Sensation tells us that a thing is, Thinking tells us what the thing is, and Feeling tells us what [the thing] is worth to us. Intuition is about trusting hunches.”
According to Jung, a person who manages to balance these four different parts of their mind was able to accomplish transcendence. However, he believed that a lack of balance between these four aspects would define an individual’s personality, temperament, or “neurosis.” This perspective is what gave way to Jung’s eight personality types (see image below).
Jung’s eight personality types, with “transcendence” represented in the space where they each intersect.
While Jung’s theory was and likely still is often criticized as bordering on paranormal, “in 1921, Jung proved to the world in rational argument that intuition was no longer a psychologist's hobby for table turning, but the most significant function of the psyche.” Jung’s success in this came in his eventual ability to connect intuition to the formation of empathy.
There are absolutely limitations to Jung’s theories. However, intuition has continued to gain evidentiary support, with modern science displaying the very real nature of intuition, particularly in the bidirectional gut-brain axis.
Now, dear reader, I bring this forward to say something important with it: We want our children psychologically balanced and in tune with their humanity. This is often the overarching goal of education, especially early care and education, with our increasing focus on psychological skills like self-regulation and agency. Ergo, this is often what we are trying to assess, evaluate, or research when we walk into classrooms, homes, and communities with our nice, clean, ultra-rational, generalizable tools. The outcomes we look for (advertently or otherwise) are usually those that indicate each child is sitting between Jung’s eight psychological types perfectly–clear of signs from neurosis or psychological imbalance–able to integrate what is happening in the outer world into their inner world in a meaningful way, and vice versa.
However, we disregard the fact that we also look for psychological balance and thus developed intuition from someone else in early care and education environments: caregivers.
We also want their teachers, caregivers, parents, and families to be free from signs of psychological imbalance and to show up to care work with their intuition developed and ready. This is particularly true when the children are “out of balance” and truly need support navigating their ‘recalibration’ (aka, co-regulating). Though we sometimes conflate aspects of it with more “rational” constructs like “decision making” or “with-it-ness,” it plays a massively important role in direct care.
A little confused or maybe skeptical?
Let me share a quick story to illustrate:
My child’s wonderful, deeply knowing, deeply feeling, tough but soft infant teacher–a woman who I had the joy of being cared for myself as a young child–is one of the prime examples of this to me. She knows many, many things that you’d have to “read between the lines” to understand from a textbook or a course of study. For decades, she has done the impossible–cared simultaneously for six different infants at once, making sure they each get what they need. If you had the privilege to walk in her room, you would see some on their tummies, some sleeping softly, others being silly–playing, giggling, and climbing—and all the while she would tend to each of their balance, their happiness. When they’re out of line, she says, “I saw that!” More importantly, when they do something deeply good, she says, “I saw that, too.” She calls the children (including lucky little me) “my angels” and has always kept her beautiful sense of humor in her work.
When my daughter was around six months old, she started making these deep, repetitive vowel sounds. While they made me laugh, I had no idea where they came from. However, she was quite dedicated to them–randomly but consistently breaking out into these bursts of song, saying “Oooooooo, ooooooo, oooooo.”
As an ultra-rational Doctor of Philosophy, I thought long and hard about where this came from–about what to expect at this age of development, about long vowel sounds and short vowel sounds, linguistics, developmental appropriateness. Of course, I put this into action as I engaged in attunement play, built on the sound, and explored different phonemes with her.
One day, her wonderful teacher asked me in passing, “Emily, do you have a dog?” When I confirmed that we actually have three, she clapped her hands and said, “Mhm–I knew it. That’s what she’s doing–oooooooo.”
She was barking like our dogs, her playmates down on the floor at home.
Despite my rational attempts to explain, contextualize, interact, and encourage, I wasn’t able to actually tune in and see this from my infant daughter’s perspective. Yet, there was this wonderful member of my community, knowing children in general, but also deeply seeing my child, seeing me, and using intuitive data collection to help me see patterns and make connections—to see the parts of the world that commanded my child’s attention the most, like the sounds of the dogs barking that I overlooked.
Beyond connecting these dots with her intuition and expertise, she heard her sweet little “ooooooo” every day and joyfully said, “Yes, sing it!”
Would this kind of knowing make it onto a checklist about quality or a generalizable study? Maybe some parts–like her beautiful bond and interactions with my daughter, the words and tone she chooses in interactions, knowledge of child development, how fast she makes decisions, her communication with me, or her level of “with-it-ness.” But, no–the feeling I had in my gut knowing my child was loved, seen, and encouraged in ways that I couldn’t always name–that data is too messy, too subjective, too intuitive for “rational” approaches.
Better yet, the intuitive feeling of safety I had when she would hug me goodbye, tell me “Go on, get out of here,” and take hold of my child who was happily reaching for her from my arms? That wouldn’t make it there, either.
An infant interacts with a small dog outside in the grass.
Intuition in Early Care
I do not share this scenario so we can make sure caregivers know how to identify when a child has pets at home. I say this because there is a way of looking at each child and identifying meaningful patterns about their individual behavior and thinking that leads us to the best approaches to caring for them–shows us the world from their perspective so we can figure out the areas where they need us hand-over-hand, hands off, or just need a hand to hold. It always looks different every time, and thus requires our intuition.
Even if you have been a parent before. Even if you taught a child’s older sibling and the lunch their family packs looks exactly the same. Even if you’ve been working with that program for years. Each child needs to be seen and cared for individually.
This is developmentally appropriate practice, and thus encourages psychological balance and development. It makes each child feel safe, happy, engaged, joyful, cooperative, and thus creative. But, again, it takes developed intuition to facilitate. Just like Jung describes, we need to use our minds for in-the-moment sensation and perceptive data collection to balance our approach.
On top of using intuition to know how to approach and support each individual child, we can never forget how we demand caregivers themselves sit perfectly balanced at this psychological crossroads–never slipping up, never out of balance, never, ever showing signs of neurosis. We ask for this tiresome emotional labor because we all know one wrong move can stay with a child forever.
Yet, we don’t support these caregivers psychologically as a society.
For ECE professionals, we don’t pay them liveable wages, we don’t listen to their voices, and we don’t show respect for them in the broader teaching profession. In fact, our conversations, evidence-base, and checklists are typically in a style called “deficit-based,” meaning they focus on assessing, identifying, and naming the skills we feel they lack.
So, people leave the workforce, which aside from creating high turnover rates also means we don’t have many people stay long enough to offer valuable mentorships to newcomers. Even if they persist against the odds and stay in direct care work, we offer them no promotions. I mean, of course we don’t–we don’t even offer most of them health benefits! Then, we wonder why they seem so ill-prepared to act as beacons of balanced human existence–why they can’t get 100% on our super-rational, clean, high-quality checklists and studies! Well-meaning or not, we continue to remind them that every time they fall short, they hurt the children.
We do the same with parents and family members. We do not make sure they have access to affordable healthcare, including mental health services. We do not help the majority of them pay for childcare. Then, we judge their choices when they select childcare programs that we have not knighted with an official status of “high quality.”
My goodness, the way we judge and undervalue mothers, who we have assumed for centuries in philosophy, psychology, and education to be ‘a child’s first teacher,’ is particularly disgraceful! Mad when they breastfeed, mad when they don’t. Mad when they soothe children to sleep, mad when they don’t. Mad when they go to work, mad when they stay home. Mad when they rush, mad when they move too slow. Always mad, always approaching them in a deficit, too.
We place burden on burden on caregivers and expect them to lead by example and take gentle care of our little ones, of the future generation.
If the caregivers of young children are going to raise psychologically healthy children who can balance their very necessary rational and irrational aspects, they also need to have the skills, self-knowledge, and support to interact with children in ways that keep them at the center of Jung’s crossroads. We need to support their psychological balance just like we do with young children in a “whole child” framework. This starts by genuinely valuing the skills, insights, and intuitive abilities they are already bringing to the table.
Caregivers cuddle together on a couch as a young child nurses.
What can we do?
I must state again–if you are here in this field or on this blog engaging with this kind of thinking, I know you are here in reverence for early learning, for uninterrupted humanity.
Though the tools that “rationally” measure these concepts are not fit to record or honor more messy and “irrational” concepts like intuition, in the words of Maslow: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
So, let’s talk about some other tools we have that can pay more respect to the real, hard, and important care work that is happening every day in a more holistic and respectful way.
Here are some “by the book” suggestions for how we can supplement current data collection and communicate some of the nuanced concepts and skills associated with supporting early development.
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Overemphasis on “objectivity” and "rationality" removes context, emerging variables, and lived experience from the data we collect. In implementation, these approaches also tend to require additional monitoring of observers and researchers (to ensure fidelity). Overuse of this approach in research and evaluation also contributes to the overarching deficit-based approach we take with caregivers.
Yet, we can honor the scientific process while still making space for subjective experience. Not only can we, in good science we do! Here is some food for thought on how we could diversify the data and offer a more holistic picture:
Employ a bottom-up approach to data collection, analysis, and construct building. Approaching this way, rather than “top-down,” helps us collect and consider “real world” components and detaches us from the limitations of our current knowledge.
Utilize more qualitative methodology in research and evaluation. Approaches like phenomenology, ethnography, and qualitative case studies are designed to capture nuanced information, including lived experience. Methods of analysis can then be employed for research and reporting to determine important themes and patterns, including the kinds of outcomes we currently miss (this is also a great place to use AI in early phases for ‘grunt work’.)
Look to other fields of social science outside of education. Are you focusing on knowledge building or individual learning? Borrow data collection tools from psychologists! Are you focusing on cultural aspects of childcare or community-based care? Borrow data collection tools from anthropologists! Is dedication to “objectivity” standing in the way of data collection? Borrow from methods that collect subjective experience! There are other ways of thinking about the human experience that have existing tools we can use to help study human beings and their development.
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We all know that storytelling is important to young children (and if we don’t, we should). Stories are a vital part of the human experience, as they display complex concepts and perspectives that can’t be simply described or distilled. Stories can shapeshift and serve us in different ways over time, providing new insights when new perspectives and methods of analysis are applied.
This is why we need to record the stories of caregivers–especially professional caregivers and families. We need to know directly from ECE Professionals what it is like working in a childcare program today. We need to know directly from families what it is like trying to choose a childcare program in their individual communities. We have to ask them, and we have to record their answers. We have to tell their stories so that we can understand their perspectives.
Groups like ZERO TO THREE and NAEYC have recently made big pushes to collect stories from caregivers, and for this we should be most thankful. We should encourage professionals and families to participate in these kinds of initiatives, and pay attention to the implications for how we can present outcomes, results, and pressing issues. In an “ideal world,” we would compensate them for this important exchange of information as well.
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We have a tendency to devalue care work in many forms. We think that because it requires skills like intuition (something that gets confused with “maternal instinct”), that it is naturally occurring, particularly in cis women. We say anyone can comfort a child who is being asked to stay while their parent leaves. Anyone can get an elderly person to take their medicine and walk as prescribed. Anyone can care for the sick. Anyone can take care of their own children all day, every day with no days off, no pay, and no breaks. And, “if anyone can do it, there is no reason to pay well for this ability.”
This assumption is wrong, and at best disregards the value of developed intuition.
We cannot keep asking these individuals to subsidize care work in this way. We need to respect them and show them we value these skills in society. When it comes to childcare workers, this means we need to start paying them well now--show them that the way they show up to this important work, willing to try and figure it out with minimal processing time and support, matters now.
I know many of you mean well, but please don't keep asking for more qualifications first, especially without offering scholarships and financial incentives. I am well aware of the findings that a teacher or caregiver’s educational level makes a difference statistically in overall quality of care. However, so long as it remains true that those opportunities are financially inaccessible to most and, better yet, do not promise pay increases for most educators, it comes off as misguided, misogynistic rhetoric about how ECE needs to “get it together” and "professionalize" the workforce.
Remember, we have an opportunity to build a different kind of workforce here that clearly needs its own approach. Alongside pay increases, we also need to focus on establishing Career Pathways, Credit for Prior Learning (CPL), and salary supplements.
Bringing it together
Despite the fact that intuition is an important part of our humanity as well as the care of our youngest humans, we don’t always value or encourage intuition in young children because we devalue it more broadly in society–dismissing it as unpredictable and unknowable rather than observing with reverence and a willingness to learn. Yet, when it’s missing, we feel its absence.
Caregivers–including both families and professionals–need to be in tune with their own intuition in order to directly care for young children. These caregivers need mentors and systems leaders who treat them the same way we want the children to be treated. This means we need to start by seeing them as “whole” humans. Once we see and know them as individuals, we can gently guide them, nudge them into their intuitive knowing, and support their learning in ways that are developmentally appropriate and meaningful.
They don’t need to name this to accomplish it. What they need is space to refine those abilities–for us to understand that when we come into their schools, their classrooms, their homes with our clipboards, our studies, our love of young children, and our good intentions, that the hardest parts of their job are likely not on our generalizable, lab-tested, objective lists.
When we are in early learning spaces, or really all spaces where care work is being done (paid and unpaid), we must pull back in reverence of these intuitive abilities. We must recognize them, respect them, and genuinely value them. This is an investment in both our children and their caregivers.
Today, I leave you with the words of Bank Street’s co-founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who was a staunch advocate of the use of intuition and reflection in the development of the caregiver:
“I have a big window looking out on a stretch of woods and hills. Some of my visitors see the view. Some see the fly specs on the window. So is it in life. Some people center their attention on social fly specs, on debunking, on anti-crusades.
I believe that we need to see beyond our human failures and feel a lift at the broad view of human progress and human potentialities. We all need to have faith in the worth of the world. We are working on problems that my parents’ generation didn’t even recognize as problems–working in fumbling ways, as happens in new situations, but we are learning.
Perhaps the most important clause in my personal and educational credo is this: While we are learners, there is hope.”
Additional Resources
(Lucy Sprague Mitchell) Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzwlUVhFPQw
(Harvard Graduate School of Education) A Teacher’s Intuition. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/20/05/teachers-intuition
(Center for Resilient Children) 9 Tips for Co-regulating with a Child. https://centerforresilientchildren.org/coregulating/
