The Apprenticeship of Being Human: Why Early Childhood Parenting Matters to Everyone
Graham Scharf’s insight into early childhood parenting is deeply personal and multidimensional. As a NYC Teaching Fellow, Graham taught early elementary grades in a “school in need of improvement” in Brooklyn. While he earned his Master of Arts in Teaching in early childhood education, he witnessed daily the social impact of early childhood parenting on his students. By the time the kids entered Scharf’s third grade classroom, two-thirds were a year or more delayed. In the midst of struggling to help his students who faced so many obstacles to learning, Scharf himself became a father and tasted early childhood parenting firsthand.  When his eldest daughter was eighteen months old, Graham took a child care leave from the NYC Department of Education to provide full time care for his daughter. Immersed in the world of puzzles, crayons and playgrounds all day every day, he began to look for internet solutions that would tell him at the appropriate time what skills his daughter was developing, what sorts of activities she would enjoy, and what great children’s literature was appropriate for that age. After coming up empty in a search for web 2.0 solutions, Graham and his life-long friend Jonathan Dahl (who went on to found Zencoder.com) co-founded Tumblon.com, the only web app to provide interactive developmental milestones to parents of young children – along with children’s literature, activity and toy recommendations for each stage of early childhood. While Graham was at home (and at the playground, in the park, at the zoo, etc.) with his daughter, his wife was continuing her medical training with a pediatric residency, a master’s degree in public health and a fellowship in developmental and behavioral pediatrics. Family life – web startup, clinical practice, public health research, and delighting in a young child – revolved around early childhood. Graham brings all of those experiences as early childhood educator, full-time father, educational entrepreneur, and husband of a developmental pediatrician into a seamless narrative in The Apprenticeship of Being Human: Why Early Childhood Parenting Matters to Everyone.