Stop Making Children Pay for Our Priorities

“A child’s humanity is already whole. What needs developing is our willingness to honor it.” — Mary Coughlin

Protect Head Start: Invest in Young Children’s Dignity

Investing in young children is a public responsibility. Their dignity should never depend on whether protecting it is politically convenient.

There is something profoundly wrong with a society that keeps asking whether we can afford to care for young children while treating the conditions they need to flourish as negotiable.

Babies do not get to postpone their development until the budget improves. Toddlers cannot wait for the political climate to become more favorable. A preschooler struggling to feel safe cannot put their need for connection on hold while adults debate whether the person helping them is an unnecessary expense.

Their lives are happening now.

And the decisions we make about those lives reveal what our declarations about children and families actually mean.

I support the Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health—MassAIMH—and its opposition to the proposed weakening of Head Start’s federal performance standards. Its statement recognizes something that should be obvious but is repeatedly obscured in policy debates: relationships require conditions. Children need adults who have the time, knowledge, support, and resources to care for them well.

Those conditions deserve public investment.

The federal proposal, titled “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs,” would remove more than 1,400 regulatory provisions. Among the proposed changes are removal of federal numerical staffing and group-size requirements, monthly mental health consultation requirements, and the existing federal limitations on suspension and prohibition on expulsion. Statutory obligations would remain, and state and local requirements would still apply. But many detailed federal safeguards would disappear.

The administration presents this as greater flexibility and less bureaucracy. I support making systems easier to navigate and freeing educators from work that does not help children. But we need to examine what is being removed before applauding the removal.

An adult available to notice a baby’s cues is not bureaucracy. Help for an educator trying to understand a distressed child is not administrative clutter. A clear expectation that children receive support before being excluded is a protection with a human purpose.

We should be asking whose burden is reduced—and who will carry what remains.

A requirement can disappear from a document while the need it addressed remains in a classroom.

A child still needs comfort. A family still needs help navigating services. An educator still needs someone to consult when their best efforts are not enough. Calling the requirement optional does not make those needs optional.

In my work in trauma-informed developmental care, I return again and again to the relationship between what we expect of people and the conditions we provide for them. We cannot demand responsive care while making responsiveness harder to deliver. We cannot preach compassion while withholding the staffing, preparation, and support that allow compassion to become consistent practice.

The American Academy of Pediatrics identifies safe, stable, nurturing relationships as central to healthy development and to buffering adversity. That understanding should shape our public decisions as surely as it shapes our clinical care.

A baby’s cry carries information. A toddler’s distress calls for curiosity. A preschooler’s behavior may tell us about fear, frustration, disability, fatigue, sensory overwhelm, or a need they cannot yet express.

Understanding that communication takes time. Responding well takes capacity.

When we remove support from the adults, we risk narrowing their ability to see the child. Distress can become disruption. A need can become a nuisance. A child who needs more help can become the child everyone wishes would leave.

This is why infant and early childhood mental health consultation matters. In a randomized study, consultation reduced teacher-rated behavior problems; it did not significantly reduce the measured likelihood of expulsion. The evidence deserves that precision, and it supports taking consultation seriously as help for the adults and environments surrounding children.

We should strengthen that capacity.

We should also stop using the language of resilience to excuse the absence of support. Children’s capacity to adapt does not release adults from responsibility for what they are being asked to endure. Families’ resourcefulness does not justify leaving them alone with impossible choices. Educators’ dedication does not make exhaustion a sustainable staffing strategy.

Care depends on people. People need care, too.

The proposal’s own analysis estimates approximately $111.3 million in annual reductions in health and mental health expenditures under its primary scenario. It also acknowledges that removing prescribed staffing ratios and group sizes could mean less individualized attention for children. These are modeled consequences, not enacted funding cuts, but they deserve public scrutiny.

What would those changes mean in a child’s day? Who would have less time to notice? Which family would have to navigate a difficult system with less help? What support would an educator lose just when a situation became more complex?

An honest accounting must include those questions.

Head Start’s comprehensive design recognizes that children live within families, relationships, and communities. Learning does not happen independently of health, nourishment, belonging, or emotional safety. A child brings their whole life into the room.

Our investment must be equally attentive to the whole child.

That means funding early education alongside the supports that make participation possible. It means timely developmental services, meaningful inclusion, family partnership, mental health support, and a workforce paid and supported to do demanding relational work.

And it means recognizing that children deserve these things now.

I am weary of having to justify their care primarily through the adults they might become. Future educational, economic, and health benefits matter. But a baby does not need to demonstrate a future return on investment to deserve comfort today. A child with a disability does not need to prove future productivity to deserve belonging. A family experiencing poverty does not need to earn our recognition of its humanity.

I am tired of watching infants and young children disappear beneath the language adults use to manage them: difficult, disruptive, costly, burdensome. Every label can draw our attention away from the person before us. Their dependence creates an obligation in us; it does not diminish their humanity. Their inability to explain their suffering does not make that suffering less real. We must stop making recognition of their personhood conditional on their ability to demand it.

Children are already people. Their dignity is already real.

For me, this is also a question of democratic stewardship. Young children cannot vote, organize a lobbying campaign, or challenge the terminology in a regulatory analysis. Adults hold power over conditions children must live within.

That power creates an obligation to pay attention, to question, and to act.

I stand with MassAIMH in calling for withdrawal of this proposal and preservation of enforceable protections for young children. We can improve administration while sustaining the safeguards that make comprehensive care possible. We can listen to educators about what wastes their time while investing in what helps them know and support children.

Public comments are due October 6, 2026. Read the proposed rule and follow its public-comment instructions, using docket ACF-2026-0595. Tell the agency why staffing, mental health consultation, developmental support, disability inclusion, and protection from exclusion matter in children’s actual lives.

Then carry that commitment beyond the comment period. Ask your elected representatives to defend comprehensive early childhood services. Support the organizations doing this work. Challenge rhetoric that treats caring for children as an indulgence.

Our youngest children should not have to absorb the consequences of our unwillingness to invest.

Their childhood is happening now. Our responsibility is, too.

With fierce care—and an insistence that our youngest children count,

Mary

Sources and Further Reading

Administration for Children and Families. (2026, August 7). Reducing federal burden for Head Start programs [Proposed rule]. Federal Register, 91, 51248. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/07/2026-16134/reducing-federal-burden-for-head-start-programs

Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start. (n.d.). Head Start Program Performance Standards: 45 C.F.R. Chapter XIII. https://headstart.gov/policy/45-cfr-chap-xiii

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (n.d.). Serve and return: Back-and-forth exchanges. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/serve-and-return/

Garner, A., Yogman, M., Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, & Council on Early Childhood. (2021). Preventing childhood toxic stress: Partnering with families and communities to promote relational health. Pediatrics, 148(2), e2021052582. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-052582

Gilliam, W. S., Maupin, A. N., & Reyes, C. R. (2016). Early childhood mental health consultation: Results of a statewide random-controlled evaluation. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 55(9), 754–761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2016.06.006

Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health. (2026, September 25). Comment on “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs” [Public comment concerning Docket ACF-2026-0595]. Submitted to the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Williams, P. G., Yogman, M., Council on Early Childhood, & Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health. (2023). Addressing early education and child care expulsion. Pediatrics, 152(5), e2023064049. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2023-064049

United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. (2006). General comment No. 7 (2005): Implementing child rights in early childhood (CRC/C/GC/7/Rev.1). https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Women/WRGS/Health/GC7.pdf