July 13, 2026: Early Childhood Advocates: Jane Addams

[On July 14^th, 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock published the first edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In that book and throughout his career Spock was one of our most vocal & vital early childhood educators and advocates, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other such advocates, leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite early childhood educator!]

On three distinct and equally valuable ways that the iconic reformer advocated for children.

1. Hull House and The Spirit of Youth: I wrote a good bit about Hull House, the hugely influential settlement house that Addams and her lifelong partner Ellen Gates Starr opened in Chicago in 1889, in that first hyperlinked post. Its work focused on many different layers to immigrant families, communities, women, work, education, and more, but children were very much at the heart of Addams’s social vision and mission. She distilled her ideas about both their importance and the need to advocate for them amidst the challenges of modern life in her 1909 book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, which specifically argued for recreation programs, games and play, and other ways of protecting the best of childhood from urban, social, and capitalist forces that might mature children more quickly than would be ideal.
2. The Juvenile Protective Association (JPA): Addams fought for children not only through her settlement house and such publications, but also and even more pointedly through a groundbreaking and inspiring social and legal organization she helped found in 1901. Known first as the Juvenile Court Committee, as its initial role was to provide probation officers for the nation’s first Juvenile Court (which had been established in Chicago in 1899), this organization gradually expanded to provide a variety of legal protections as well as social and therapeutic support systems for and research into issues affecting all children, but most especially disadvantaged children. It might seem like common sense that children need such specific and targeted support, but it took the efforts of folks like Addams and her colleagues to help push such ideas into the mainstream.
3. Neva Boyd: The most inspiring reformers and advocates don’t just advance their own ideas, of course—they recognize other folks who have contributions to make and help elevate them into the conversation as well. Addams did that with any number of fellow activists, but a great example for early childhood education was Neva Boyd, who founded the Recreational Training School at Hull House to emphasize the importance of games and play in children’s education and lives. Boyd would bring those same emphases to the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA)’s Chicago Training School for Playground Workers, and during that same 1930s period Boyd’s protégé Viola Spolin (the future inventor of the influential Theatre Games program) would return to Hull House to carry forward her legacy there. Through figures such as these we can truly trace Jane Addams’s legacy across the whole of 20^th century early childhood education, and into the 21^st as well.

Next early childhood educator tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?