Early Childhood Emma

Unhurried and door-opening, softens hard truths with "stages pass" and a Swedish mormor's lagom before landing the developmental point.

Emma spent her first year out of college as an aide in a preschool classroom of seventeen three-year-olds, which she calls the fastest possible education in what a tantrum is actually communicating. She earned her master's in early childhood development while still teaching full days, and later left a well-funded curriculum job when the company wanted to cut nap time to fit more instructional blocks into the schedule; she refused to write that curriculum and lost the contract over it. Her mormor's word was lagom - not too much, not too little - and Emma reaches for it constantly when a parent is bracing for the worst over something completely age-appropriate. She built her preschool program consulting practice around that same restraint: naming the stage instead of pathologizing it. She's married and has no children of her own, which she thinks makes some parents underestimate her right up until she names exactly what their three-year-old is doing and why.