Episode 22: “How is early learning being supported globally?”

[MUSIC PLAYING] ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: You're listening to Raising Curious Learners, a podcast from Britannica for Parents where we talk to experts and discuss the issues and trends in child development, education, and parenting.

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Welcome back to Raising Curious Learners. I'm Elizabeth Romanski and my cohost, as always, is Ann Gadzikowski. At Britannica for Parents, much of our focus is on parenting in the United States, but we actually have a lot of readers from across the globe.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: There are certainly many parenting topics and issues that are universal to everyone. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has impacted children and families everywhere, and I've been really curious about what experiences like lockdowns and remote learning have been like for families in other parts of the world.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: Yes, me too. And I'm really excited because we have someone on our podcast today who can talk about that. Polly Crowther is an early educator in the UK. She is also a cofounder of a group called Early Insights that advocates for young children and supports early learning and child care across the globe. So we're so excited to have you today. Welcome, Polly.

POLLY CROWTHER: Thank you. Hi.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Polly, can you tell us about your work in early childhood education and your role, specifically, at Early Insights?

POLLY CROWTHER: So my life is early childhood education at dawn to dusk at the moment. I have my own two young children, who are three and six. I'm head of Early Years at a school in Kent, near London, in the UK. I have a role with the East London Research School, specializing in early education and play as well. And as you said, I'm the cofounder of Early Insights, which is a global early childhood education and care community. We came together in March 2020 with a recognition that educators and early educators around the world were facing this shared challenge of the COVID lockdowns.

Specific challenges to do with early education remotely because a lot of that can't be delivered with technology in the same way that other learning could be. And in that time, we've learned in really meaningful ways that it's not just COVID. In many different countries, we face so many different local challenges. But early childhood education around the world, I think, has more in common than we have apart. We now have members in five continents with a variety of different conversations and learning communities developing.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: Before we get too far into the podcast, we acknowledge that we usually talk and address parenting in the United States and a lot of our listeners, the majority, are in the United States. So they're very familiar with how COVID is right now. But for the UK, we're not as familiar. So could you give a quick snapshot of where things are in the UK right now? Because in the States at the time of this recording, a lot of different states are expanding the vaccine rollout. Schools are still hybrid, but there are a lot of changes coming through. So I was curious if you could just give a quick overview of how things are currently.

POLLY CROWTHER: Yeah, of course, and it has been absolutely fascinating to see the kind of ups and downs in different countries around the world and how they're treating education during their lockdown. So right now, every school in the UK is fully open for in-person learning with early childhood education being the same unless you have a confirmed case in your school in which case, we might be closed. That has been the case for about three weeks where children came back to fully in-person learning about three weeks ago.

Before that, since December, all of the schools have been predominantly closed for in-person learning, delivering online or remote learning, but they have remained open for children who are considered to be vulnerable for one reason or another or children of, what we call, key workers, so workers who are essential for the COVID response, whose roles have not been locked down, and there has been a slight difference in this lockdown from March last year. Those numbers, what counts as vulnerable and what counts as a key worker, has expanded quite a lot.

So in the end, there's been maybe 20%, 25% of children in school during that period of time as well.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: And you coordinate what's called Early Years at your school. Can you define what Early Years is considered in the UK?

POLLY CROWTHER: In the UK, it is naught to five. In Early Insights, the community that I work with, we normally consider it to be up to seven because that globally includes what we're talking about.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: So, Polly, tell us about your direct experience in your work and with your own little ones from the beginning of the pandemic, not necessarily the whole story, but what was it like on the ground for you dealing with all of this as it began to unfold?

POLLY CROWTHER: I mean, it's been such a riot, hasn't it? It's just been a year now, and it has been such a challenging time for so many people. On a personal level, in my own family, I feel hugely blessed because we don't have any particular barriers that we face outside of COVID as a family. We have secure jobs. We have secure income. We have a home. We don't have any health problems. And I think for any family, any extra challenge right now has been something to overcome.

Our first lockdown, I guess, was a really big focus on supporting my own children at home because the schools were less able to interact, didn't have the infrastructure in place here. I don't know so much what it was like in the States, but it wasn't the case that we regularly communicated online between schools and parents. And so a lot of the work that we were doing was keeping our children busy, I guess, at home while we were trying to work out what we were do in schools as well.

And weirdly, also, we were just super-lucky because the sun shone in the UK for about two months solid during the first lockdown. So I did have actually some quite joyful time with my family, being able to play in the sandpit or buckets of water outside. I think, as time has gone on, the challenges of lockdown have become more profound for us, not being able to see the people that we care about, not being able to nurture the relationships that are really important to us. My son started to have nightmares about people in his family vanishing into dust.

And I think that was really connected to just not feeling that tangible sense that everyone was around. So that's something that we've tried to do a lot to work on here, and learning has become a lot more structured. So most schools now have got a lot more remote provision, and our government has placed expectations on the schools that they have to meet in terms of remote provision, as well. So for the school in which I work, I work in a school where for last year, about half of our children were considered to be in poverty.

By the time we started in September, it was closer to 3/4 of our children living in poverty, which is a very rapid and significant increase in the challenges that are being faced by our communities. And for those children who already faced a lot of barriers in access to learning and other really important services for parents and children, health care, mental health, social services, those things have felt, for some of our families, almost insurmountable during this time, I would say.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: It sounds like your experience and the experiences of the families you work with are not that different from what we've seen here in the States. What might be different is that in the United States we have state governments that have autonomy to make their own decisions about schools and about masks and all different kinds of factors. But I'm wondering if your experience is-- has there been, perhaps, maybe a little bit more clarity or a little bit more unity in what's going on because you're not dealing with all these different states or is that not the case?

POLLY CROWTHER: It probably is, in comparison to the States, I would say. I'm not sure if people in the UK would feel like there'd been a lot of clarity, a lot of the time, so--

[LAUGHTER]

--one of the things that happened here for example, which I can't really overstate how challenging this was for families and schools was that over the Christmas holiday period, schools were expected to reopen on January, the 4th, I believe it was. Right up until January, the 4th, the government was telling us that it was absolutely safe for schools in some areas to return and schools in a select couple of areas were not going to return for two weeks. Children went back to school on January, the 4th, and at 5 o'clock that day, our prime minister announced that actually we were going to go into a national lockdown until two weeks ago.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Wow.

POLLY CROWTHER: So all of those children and all of those teachers and all of those families went in for that one day to interact with one another and then went home again.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: Oh gosh.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Oh my goodness. Wow.

POLLY CROWTHER: So I wouldn't say that we have thought that there has been clarity in the sector or for families for a lot of the time, but there probably has been more of a national approach.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: I do think that that clarity is one thing that's missing in a lot of similar stories in other countries, but I do think that it sounds like with regards to education in the UK, there's a little bit more of a cohesive approach, whereas as what Ann was saying, state by state, even district by district, in the States is quite a bit different, and there is a lot of variation.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: And I think most of what we've talked about so far is true for all children. So let's focus a little bit on the younger children. I know in the UK you have a national curriculum for the early years. How has the curriculum served you during all of these disruptions? Have you been able to continue to teach and are the children still learning or have you had to adapt quite a bit?

POLLY CROWTHER: So I think this has been one of the really major challenges for early childhood, particularly in comparison to later stages of the curriculum, because you're right. We are very lucky in the UK actually that we do have quite a clear curriculum that is tailored for the needs of early learners. And our three areas that we call the prime areas of that curriculum in the UK are communication and language, physical development, and personal, social, and emotional development.

And those are things that it is very, very difficult to teach through a screen. Physical development, obviously, you can set children video yoga or things to copy, but it isn't the same, is it? It's not the physical development that children really need, the kind of tumbling and climbing and the running and free space that they need to have the personal, social, and emotional development. That's really what I was talking about with my own family. We are so shaped by our interactions with other people, aren't we? Even as adults and as children, it's such a critical part of their cognitive development.

The communication that they have with other people, the way that forms their ideas of who they are, who other people are, how that's different. All of those complicated understandings of how other humans work in the same space as you. You can't do that in a remote context. And communication and language, similarly, in my class, I had 90% of my children I assessed as needing a communication and language intervention at the beginning of this year. And for many of them, that might have been because they missed half of their year preceding at nursery too.

And I think there's some research evidence that shows that it's hard for children to learn communication and speech meaningfully even through video calls or screen-based interaction because it just lacks that social connection. Again, I think that's something that adults have felt. Having a meeting over Zoom just lacks that personal feeling of powerful connection and conversation that you can have when you're in a room with someone. So those three curriculum areas, we have had to be as inventive and creative as possible.

And again, actually, that's one of the ways that working as part of a global community has been so powerful for us, because in a lot of countries, a national crisis, that means that children can't access their education or their preschool education, is not unheard of in the way that it is in the UK or in the US. My colleagues in Lebanon have got amazing innovative ways to reach families and children through WhatsApp messages that model a game, for example, rather than through a Zoom lesson.

So I was looking to colleagues globally who knew what a crisis was and how to reach families in that situation because that was where the expertise lay in that time.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Can you give us some other examples besides Lebanon or some of the countries and the practices that you've been hearing about.

POLLY CROWTHER: Yeah. There are so many nice stories of the things that people have done in their communities and for their children. So in Cambodia, I know some of my colleagues, they basically just had outside lessons for small groups of children because there wasn't really a way to teach them remotely. They had children come together in groups of five or six and just in the playground of the school rather than in the physical building. Our colleagues in India set up these amazing WhatsApp posters that ended up being shared with hundreds or thousands of people which they were again-- you could have a paper poster that you could then use as your explanation of your activity.

They used QR codes to then link to further resources online. These are based on mobile technology, which is what the majority of people around the world are using to access the Internet rather than more stable devices in their homes. And another community that we work with, that's based in India, were doing work where they were not able to reach families individually but were reaching community leaders. So quite often, community matriarch figures and providing resources and support for communities. A lot of early childhood education, you don't need a lot of resources.

You don't need a lot of technology to do it. But you do need a bit of confidence. All parents who've had young children will recognize the confidence-crushing feeling of, I can never get all of this right. This is so hard. But actually someone just saying to you, why don't you count the knives and forks, and see how many we all need as a family to put out on the table or why don't you ask them-- one of my favorite ones is telling my children to jump up and down 20 times before they ask me again for a snack because--

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: I like that.

[LAUGHTER]

POLLY CROWTHER: Just buys me a bit of time in between snacks. But just small things that give families the confidence that actually you can fit in your day-to-day and what you're doing is already good, it's already great. So a lot of it, I think, wherever people were in the world was about reaching parents with that-- like an encouraging hand, I guess.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: OK. So it's time for a quick break but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

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ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: So you said that you are now back in person and have been for about three weeks, and this is going to be a loaded question because everything can change very quickly as we know. But where do you see things going forward? Earlier, you said about, I think, 90% of the kids you've marked early this year as having some communication issues. So where do you go from here? Now that you're back in person, both parents and you probably feel like, ah, did we lose the whole year?

So, yeah. I know, again, it's a loaded question because things can change but have you thought about any crucial next steps or any ways to support these kids that have really just-- their lives have been turned upside down in their tiny little early years.

POLLY CROWTHER: Yes, we definitely have. I think just on that last point, I would say they are young children, but they do know that things are strange, and they understand that this is a very serious and challenging time for people, but also little children are used to things not making sense to them, and they are accustomed to adults telling them to go here or do that or put their hands on their knees or whatever, in a way where they can't really rationalize why they would have to do that.

And so in some respects, I think they are quite accustomed to processing some of those changes in a way that probably is harder for adults. In terms of what we're putting in place for those children, I think the thing that I have found the most challenging is that the gap between children who have lots of support and children who don't has grown really wide. So for some children, school closures meant they had loads of time with loving families, who were able to provide support and connection, whose employers were suddenly required to be more understanding and allow them to work at home and take some time to be involved in child care.

Our children did have access to online learning. We were very lucky. My school was able to provide devices to all of our children as well to access their learning digitally. So for some of those families, they were able to sit-in on lessons for 15 minutes, see the early childhood educators modeling an activity, and then go away and basically be like a one-to-one teacher for their child and practicing that activity. So some of those children have had a level of support and interaction from their family and their school that they have never had before.

But some of our children whose parents have got special educational needs of their own or who have mental health problems or who faced crises at home already or because of COVID, they have really been in an isolated bubble. A big piece of work that we have been doing since children have been back, just remembering what it's like to be together, making meaning of all of the interactions that we have together and reminding ourselves of the power of those connections.

I think I'm really lucky to work in early childhood education because I can legitimately, in an evidence-informed way, do that through play and have a wonderful time sharing stories, reading books together, playing in the roleplay area or in the home corner, finding out how they're feeling without having to interrogate or ask them questions. Just learn what's going on with them. I won't say it's been easy. Some of our children, it has been tough for them.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: I'm so glad you mentioned play, because when I hear people talk about learning loss and how our children have missed so much, I think about the play that they've missed. It's more of a play-loss in early childhood. They've missed the opportunities to play with their friends. And as you mentioned, their families, for many families have been under such stress and have experienced such hardships. To me, that's the bigger concern than whether they learn their ABCs or their 123s. So how do educators and parents make up for that loss of play during the past year?

POLLY CROWTHER: I don't know if all children will have lost lots-- some children would have had more play with their main caregiver or even with their siblings who normally they would have been separated from at school with. But certainly, elements of the play that you see in an early childhood setting, the social play, where you have to learn some really difficult forms of self-regulation and thinking before you act, and sharing and taking in turns, as well as the resilience that it takes to build a tower and see another kid knock it over and build it again. All of those adaptive skills that you develop through play, certainly.

And again, as I said before, the physical development, the real growth that happens when you're using a climbing frame or when you're accessing the kind of physical resources that maybe a lot of people don't have at home. I think that's going to be a huge challenge for early childhood educators and educators later on. So in a lot of the conversations that I'm having, we are talking about extending the Early Years curriculum beyond the end of this year. The children I'm teaching now in reception, who would be finishing-- that's like kindergarten, they would be going into formal learning in September.

But they will have missed some of their nursery preschool education and some of their kindergarten preschool education And is there a way that we should be integrating play more throughout the curriculum? There are, of course, ways that you can integrate play all the way through primary education especially. And I think some schools and some other service providers are looking really imaginatively at how they do that. I really hope that, in some ways, children being able to go back to school in person will also provide parents with the space to play with their children because I think-- I don't know how other parents feel, and maybe I have put too much pressure on myself.

But I feel like there's the pressure to do the things that the school wants you to do and to submit the pieces of work that you're supposed to do at home. There's the pressure from your job to do the things that you need to do for work. There's the pressure to do all of the normal family stuff, like not have piles of laundry everywhere and make sure that everybody has three meals a day, and all of those things. And actually, it's really easy for play. Even when it's your job and you know how important it is, it's really easy for play to get squeezed out of that equation.

Because play involves immersing yourself in something. Play involves letting go of all of that other stuff and putting yourself in a different world, a different reality, a different set of rules. And in order to do that, grown-ups really have to put the effort in. It might seem like it's easy for children to do, but for us to engage with children in that, we really have to make the time and space to do it. And I think we can do that in schools. We can carve out that time, but I think it's also really important that we do that as parents as well and value children carving out that time.

And I think, also now more than ever, we talked about learning loss, and when we talk about children recovering from the pandemic, one of the things that I really try to hold, when I'm planning what I do with my children in school with regards to the curriculum areas that they have to catch up on, is that we are all going to have to shape a new reality now. Whatever happens, things are not going to be the same again. And that's what play does. In play, you do create a new world. You have this low stakes setting in which you can try how to solve a problem. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, because it wasn't real anyway.

Or you have a world in which you can bend the rules. You can try and create a new reality and see how that works. And we all need that at the moment. We all need the sense of autonomy and control that play brings, because how many of us feel like we've got autonomy or are in control of what's going on right now? And if we can engage in that with our children, actually, I think it would probably be quite powerful for us as grown-ups too.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: I think grown-ups even forget what play means, what it looks like. I mean, as I hear you talk, I'm thinking about outdoor play, running around, playing on a playground, climbing. I'm thinking about pretend-play, taking on different roles, pretending to be at a grocery store, pretending to be a zookeeper. I'm thinking about playing games like actual board games or card games. I'm thinking about construction play, where you're building something. You're making something out of cardboard or blocks. Polly, do you have a favorite kind of play as an educator or as a mom? Or Elizabeth, do you have a favorite kind of play?

[LAUGHTER]

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: I mean, I can go. I've always enjoyed pretend-play. I've felt like that was the easiest for me, and my niece and I-- my niece lives in another state and we'll do virtual play-dates together. And so it's very heavily reliant on imagination. And because we have to play together over a screen and use objects that we may have as a bow and arrow, so we get a hanger or something. So I think, I've just always been naturally good at pretend-play, and it's stayed with me. So I think that would be my favorite because I think the one thing I want to say is for adults, it's very hard to play in any form because we multitask by nature.

And then given everything we're juggling now, we're multitasking even more. And play, in order to really not only engage with a child, but also get the most out of it for yourself is, you can't multitask. As you said, Polly, you have to immerse yourself in that. So I do think that for me pretend-play helps shut out all of the multitasking because it wraps me into a new world. So I would say that would be my favorite, but I'm curious, Polly, what yours is.

POLLY CROWTHER: I think that's a really interesting point that you raise about adults finding it hard to play, and I don't remember what the piece of research is, but I had a conversation with Bo Stjerne who's the head of the LEGO Foundation Play Lab because we did some training with them on their play-based learning. And he was saying how play for adults and even observing play in children is one of the most powerful things that you can do to develop your cognitive flexibility as an adult. I'm definitely not an expert on that at all.

But I know that children, they are more generalists than we are as adults. We prune the things that we need to know how to do in order to focus on the skills and the knowledge that we're developing. And the more that we do playful activities, play-based activities, we're probably not doing things that we've trained ourselves to do for quite a long time, that we focused ourselves out of doing. For me, actually, my favorite kind of play probably is outdoor play, and in particular, I am very passionate about environmental stewardship and the responsibility that our youngest learners are going to have for fixing a lot of problems that are going to be extremely urgent for them as they progress through their education system.

And I think that watching children as they engage with nature, just poking and prodding it, and you can take a small child. I can take my daughter just to the end of the road and it can take me 45 minutes or an hour to get there because she'll quite happily pick something from a bush, pick up a bug, find a lovely feather on the floor that comes from something that she wants to play with, and just explore her environment in a way that we don't really take the time to do. And in a way, that is really important, asking questions about how your world works is how you become a scientist or how you become a creative or anything, really, because it's how you start piecing together your sense of the world.

And at this time of year where I am, it's becoming springtime, and it's that wonderful time of year to talk about the changes that are happening. Flowers that are coming out, life cycles. Just being outside and noticing the world around you is probably one of the things that I enjoy the most.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: So you mentioned earlier, Polly, that we can use this time to rethink or reinvent our world or how we think about our world through play. What about the field of early childhood education? Do you see it being in some ways maybe permanently changed by what we've all been through in the past year?

POLLY CROWTHER: I mean, it's hard to imagine that everything won't be permanently changed by what we've all been through in some respects. And I think, there's no doubt that it will certainly have an impact for many years to come. I guess there's likely to be both positive and challenging sides to that lasting impact, I think. The impact that we've seen of children lacking those social connections, I think, is pretty hard to know what that's going to do in the longer term. One of the things that has been quite interesting working with a global community has been seeing how approaches that are quite similar can be interpreted in quite different ways, dependent on how early childhood education is viewed.

And I think that it has provided an opportunity for people to talk about early childhood education in different ways. In the UK, we've talked a lot about its importance to the economy in a way that we haven't perhaps talked about it before. And there's been some recognition, probably not enough, but there's been some recognition that the impact of COVID on women in particular and the workload that women have taken on with regards to the unpaid labor of homeschooling and just looking after the household has been disproportionate.

But the Office of National Statistics here released a really interesting report in how men and women were differently balancing working from home and supporting with home learning. So I hope that there will be some important conversations about the shared responsibility across society for early childhood education because if it doesn't happen, nothing else really works, in a way that, I think, has perhaps been recognized. I hope also that people have had an element of recognition of just the importance of joy and play and childhood and that we know we have a responsibility to provide that for our children as well, because the bits that were easier to deliver from school were the information sharing, in many respects.

But the bit where you build your own community, where you have those playful experiences, where you fill your cup of joyful good things that help you to deal with all of the difficult things, that has been much, much harder to replace. On a personal, slightly egotistical level, perhaps, or also for the sector in general, I have heard a few people say things like, those Early Years teachers, those kindergarten teachers, they must be magical. I don't know how they get 30 children to do this thing that I can't get my one child to do for a minute and a half.

And sometimes I do hear them say that, and I think, yeah, no , I do - I am.

[LAUGHTER]

And enjoy that moment. In a serious sense-- that's a very flippant way of putting it, but in a serious sense, early childhood education in every country, as far as I know, is viewed as a less qualified, less serious part of the education sector. We talk about it in the UK as if you go up the school, it's like you're being promoted. I have a doctorate and people will say to me, "why do you work in Early Years? You could work anywhere." But it's the hardest part of the school to work in, in many ways, because you have to have the play, you have to have the nurture, and you have to be sharing the knowledge rigorously, as well.

But it's also the most important because it is a time in children's lives when we can close gaps for them. We can identify their needs. We can support children to make progress really rapidly in a way that they find harder later on, and also we can help them to build their sense of identity as learners and as citizens, in a way that comes a little bit more cemented as they develop later on. And it would be a wonderful thing if people did start to recognize that actually early educators do something that I believe is a little bit magic and could be recognized for that.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: I think that's a great takeaway message for our podcast. A recognition of the expertise and the value of early childhood educators. But as we wrap up, Polly, I'm wondering for our listeners, we know we have a lot of parents as listeners, so do you have any ending advice for how to support young children at home right now?

POLLY CROWTHER: In the UK, quite recently, there was a survey by the Royal Foundation by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on how parents were feeling about early education in particular in the pandemic. And one of the things that came out of that was that loneliness and isolation in normal times is a huge challenge for parents with young children. And another challenge for them is a feeling of being judged, a feeling that you might be getting it wrong. And I think that probably the biggest thing that I would want parents to hear, that I would want parents to think about at this time, is they're not alone and they're not getting it wrong.

Parents are working so hard right now to juggle so many things, and we are all in it together, even if we can't all physically be in the same space, sharing the experience and learning from one another in the way that we would do, but there are ways to do that. And reaching out to other parents. There is still an opportunity. If you have access to any way to do that, then I would suggest using it because I think you're going to find parents in the same position as you quicker than you think. A lot of people right now are not finding it easy and that's OK.

And in terms of-- the parents are getting it right. I think we know the most important thing for early child development is a stable, loving relationship with your main caregiver. If that's not in place, it's very hard for children to learn. If that is in place, it's such a powerful start. And there are so many things that you are already doing in your day-to-day life, like I said, counting the steps or the knives and forks, reading stories, pointing out a flower that you happen to know the name of, listening to the birds. All of those things are powerful learning experiences for children.

And if you're giving them love and you're giving them time, however much you have, then you are doing what they need you to do.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: That's wonderful. So, parents, you're not alone. And you are enough for your child.

POLLY CROWTHER: Absolutely.

ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Polly, thank you so much for talking with us today. This has been a really, really interesting conversation. We appreciate your sharing your expertise with us.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: Yes, thank you.

POLLY CROWTHER: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been lovely to talk about something that I love so much.

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ELIZABETH ROMANSKI: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Raising Curious Learners. Special thanks to our guest this week, Polly Crowther, cofounder of Early Insights and head of Early Years at Oasis Academy in Medway, England, for telling us about her experience working as an early childhood educator during the pandemic on the other side of the pond. I'm Elizabeth Romanski, and my cohost, as usual, is an Ann Gadzikowski. Our audio engineer and editor for this program is Emily Goldstein.

If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, leave us a review, and share with your friends.

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ANN GADZIKOWSKI: Hey, everyone. This episode is brought to you by Britannica for Parents, a free site with expert advice for your tech-savvy family needs. Whether it's explaining Zoom to your three-year-old, navigating your child's new friendship with Siri, or more serious topics like talking to young children about the police, or sending your kids back to school during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're here to help with resources for parents of all age groups. Check us out at parents.britannica.com.

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