Whenever I tell the kids in my grade at my college, that my major is early child education, there response usually is: "that's such an easy major. All you do is play with kids all day and stuff. That's not even a real major."
To be completely honest, most of the kids in my grade are either film majors or theatre kids. I'm not sure of the exact number of kids majoring in these, but I can safely say the majority of people I talk to at DePaul, in my grade, are either film majors or theatre kids. One or the other.
But, early child education is more than playing with kids all day "and stuff".
No one talks about:
Active shooters in the school, when you have a classroom full of 5-6 year olds who wanna go outside and play and are so hyper, what do you do then? How do you keep them quiet? And still?
You receive a handle with care note (those are only distributed when the child is present during police respond to an incident of violence) the next morning. You think there could've been a domestic violence situation going on in the kids home, how do you handle that? What do you do? And then child protective services get's involved and come's and pulls the kid from your class. How do you address this? Maybe the parents got taken away when the police were there and the child didn't get any sleep that night.
Cyberbullying. How do you prevent the kids from getting cyberbullied? How do you keep them safe? Catfishes online. How do we keep them safe and protected?
Yes, you do a LOT with little kids. That's what your job is, but there is SO much more to it than just " playing with little kids all day".
I, personally, think being an early child education major is super hard. You have to deal with all of this, plus a lot more that's often un-talked about.
