What if “small is all”?
Scaling imagination as emergent strategy
My new year started off with a big decision for our family: changing childcare providers. Our current center is experiencing increased staff turnover and therefore decreasing staff consistency. If you are parenting young children or have been following the ongoing childcare crisis in the United States, then this is likely unsurprising. We’ve been fortunate these last two years: we formed some great relationships with the center staff, and our child has been happy and well cared for. Much of the two years our child had consistent teachers. But that has recently shifted dramatically, and we decided that changing child care providers is necessary for our family at this particular stage of our child’s development.
My husband and I were both surprised by how emotional a change this has been to navigate. One evening we toured the new center where our child will start soon: we could see our child being successful there, the curriculum was clear, the center was very clean, the staff was friendly. Even though we both agreed this was the right change, that night we both felt so sad. We dreaded writing the email to let our center director know we were withdrawing. We didn’t want to say goodbye to the people we had grown to trust so deeply, the people who have cared for our child since she was three months old. It felt a lot like a breakup, and in many ways it was: this was the end of a relationship that served us well for a long time, and now is no longer working for us. We felt let down - not by the individual people, but by the larger systemic failures around how the childcare industry in the US is set up. The systemic effects of massively undervaluing the care of young children had caught up to us on a very individual, deeply personal level.
The emotional experience of choosing and trusting other people to care for your child is so wildly out of alignment with how the childcare system is set up in the US. There is nothing small about the care of small, young children. The choices are big, the feelings are huge, the trust is enormous. Everything about childcare swells with significance for me. I feel the size of it when I think of the teacher my child had when she started in the infant classroom at three months old. I was a brand new parent, learning how to be away from my three month old baby, who I had to drop off in the parking lot, due to covid restrictions. I had to trust people I’d just met to care for her in a classroom I hadn’t even been inside thanks to pandemic safety restrictions. These experiences will be in my body forever, and I’ll always feel an attachment to the people who cared for my child through those hard early months of working motherhood. To under-resource, underpay and undervalue the humans in childcare will never make sense to me, given how I now understand the enormity of their labor.
This weekend I re-read some portions of Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, a text I return to often. This book is a collection of essays about interconnectedness, about how we can create change on individual and collective scales. One of the principles of emergent strategy is “small is all” meaning that “the large is reflective of the small.” For better and worse, the choices we make at the individual or organizational level replicate and scale up to the collective; they inform the structural and systemic.
My experience navigating childcare as a parent of a young child has me thinking about the opportunities in “small is all.” How we care for the smallest, youngest humans in our society is a direct reflection of our capacity to value everyone’s humanity. What would it be like to live in a world where small really was all? What if one of the organizing principles of our world was prioritizing the care of the very young and their development? What would that look like, and what would it take to bring it about? What if we viewed young children not in terms of the adults they will grow up to be, but instead saw them as the inherently wise and valuable small beings that they are right now? If we truly valued young children, then valuing their care and the adults who do this labor would necessarily follow.
I’m not closing this piece with concrete answers or policy recommendations. (For more on that, I recommend following publications such as Early Learning Nation to stay plugged in to this issue.) Instead, I want to offer an invitation to keep connecting our individual experiences to the collective, to dedicate some energy to imagining shifts that prioritize everyone’s humanity, to keep practicing making the world we want to live in. “Small is all” comforts me in that it reminds me of how ideas, systems and changes scale up and down. The big is reflected in the small and the small informs the big. “Small is all” helps me see the magnitude and significance of small actions while also showing me how small movements can grow and replicate into something larger. “Small is all” is an invitation to expand and contract. To operationalize our values on large and small scales. To see the connective tissue between the levels of our society. To stretch our imaginations so we can practice bringing about new realities that feel more aligned.
Your Turn
Here are a few questions to take with you. As always, feel free to respond below in the comments. I would love to hear your thoughts:
How does “small is all” show up in your life?
What connections does “small is all” make visible for you?
What new reality do you want to practice imagining?