Need-Finding

Through a series of in-depth interviews, 20+ volunteer hours, calls, and casual hang-outs with home daycare teachers in the Bay Area, we uncovered the following opportunities for design:

Me and Monir (Top Left)
Asia, Gigi, and me in front of Gigi’s rose bush (Top Right)
Gigi’s art for her preschool
Jean and his kids (Bottom Right)

Who We Met

Devorah
Devorah runs a Jewish daycare that she opened because she saw a lack of cultural education in early childhood in the Bay as she raised her own kids.

Jean
Jean moved to the United States because he always wanted to be a preschool teacher. In Switzerland, he faced prejudice because people told him it was a “woman's profession,” and he could not recieve the necessary teacher training. Now, he runs a bilingual, adventuresome daycare in Palo Alto where children explore to learn.

Monir
Monir immigrated from Iran, and her neighborhood preschool is a cornerstone of the Iranian-American community in the area. She makes her children home cooked meals every day and takes them to nap in her daughter's old room.

Gigi
Gigi runs a bilingual daycare where she teaches children Spanish. She is a psychic and an artist in her spare time, and her preschool is filled with art she has made over the years.

Gabriela
Gabriela also runs a bilingual home daycare where she teaches her children Mexican cultural traditions. When we visited, they were celebrating Day of the Dead.

Robin
Robin grew up around kids in her mother’s daycare. She teaches kids with different special needs at her home in EPA, and she believes that children learn best from each other. She makes sure the younger children play with the older children.

Gloria
Gloria takes care of the infants at Jean’s daycare. She sometimes invites her 17-year-old daughter to work with her, and she said she always wanted to work with kids growing up.

Research

Stories

Jean had been excited to be a teacher his whole life, and he poured hours into creating structured plans and content because he thought it was the best way to support his kids. He described it as “a complete failure.” He said they were too young to follow instructions, and they didn’t care about his plan. He used the simile of a gift – “it’s like if you offer a present to a child, they end up playing with the box.” He decided to spend a whole day observing to understand them better, and the day flew by.
Monir grew up in Iran. She said that “especially for the women over there, you have to fight for your education.” She began teaching thinking her role was to force children to know all kinds of academic content. Now she believes “you can’t force a kid into doing things at that age.” She started to follow the kids. One spring, a spider built a web and laid eggs in her backyard, and the kids watched the baby spiders grow. She had never seen the kids so excited and curious, so they spent a month building their own web.
All the teachers we interviewed in some way reflected this mental transition early in their careers from leading to following. The words that came up in every interview were following, observing, nourishing, and loving.

Finding

Home daycare workers describe a transition from planning, structuring and leading their children to nurturing, observing and following the children as their careers progress.

Insight

Here is a framework we developed to represent the transition these teachers described to us:

Demanding tangible outcomes -> accepting abstract outcomes

Facilitating learning -> observing learning

Imposing structure -> prioritizing freedom

Being the expert -> becoming the novice

Approaching teaching with confidence -> learning alongside children with humility

Supporting growth -> nurturing growth

Self-centered love -> other-centered love

We highlighted two key shifts:

01. Confidence → humility
All the teachers described the process of realizing their own misunderstandings of what children need. They humbly turned to the children as leaders of their own learning instead of looking for tangible measures of their “success.” Jean says you have to be like a scientist: good teachers go in with no expectations and see what you find.

02. Self-centered love → other-centered love
Home daycare teachers told us the most beautiful thing you can give to a child is love with freedom and trust. Gigi said the heartbreak of her first child leaving made her realize that she has to love fully but can’t expect anything in return – not validation or reciprocity. She loves them with complete trust. This unites all the daycare workers we spoke to. They give love with no restraint and complete certainty, allowing their children to gain autonomy and personhood. The children can feel that, Gigi thinks. 27 years later, Gigi shows us a rose bush the height of her house that grew from a seed from that first child.

Conclusion
The two key shifts we noticed lead us to a fascinating finding about humanity. The teachers we interviewed found personal fulfillment in a life-altering transition from ambition to aspiration. In other words, they began their careers with an ambition to be good teachers - striving for their children to learn content, controlling the learning environment, and expecting outcomes like growth, mastery, and obedience. They ended with an aspiration toward being good people. They abandoned metrics for measuring learning and instead opted for more intangible, intuitive ideas of “success” like helping children feel safe, curious, free, and resilient. This transition not only softened the difficult work of caring for little children but also led them toward a sense of deeper meaning and reverance for the lives in their care.

Needs:

Need to support children in their independent exploration and creativity
Need to observe children; need to know them fully as they are
Need to focus entirely on the children and abandon ego
Need to nurture a sense of humility and curiosity
Need to give selfless love; need to love fully