Developmentally Appropriate--or not?

DAP: the teaching philosophy related to the USA's weak, indoctrinated young adults

This is based on wide reading and many long years of observation. Nothing that I say should be understood as applying to "all" or "every" anything. I am writing in generalities.

Education and Competence

Those of us born or conceived before the end of World War II--before the baby boom--grew up knowing that life was difficult. While intact nuclear families were the norm, we all knew children whose lives had been disrupted by wars and immigration. We grew up with no expectation that life would be easy.

We attended schools where we were taught patriotism without politics. I remember during Eisenhower's presidential campaign against Adlai Stevenson we talked about it a little. We certainly were not encouraged to take a stand for or against a candidate. We memorized poetry, the times tables, the 100 Math Facts, and certain basic mathematical formulae, such as how to figure the area of a square, and we had crafts projects that required us to think and problem-solve in different ways.

Then, in the 1980's, a brand-new theory was promoted for early childhood education (birth through age 8). The first generation raised under this concept became helicopter parents, hovering over their children to protect them, discouraging competition ("losing is bad for self-esteem") and requiring a trophy for every child. Their children have grown up so psychologically weak that they need safe spaces and trigger warnings in their colleges. Ideas that contradict their own terrify them.

What destructive educational method created this fiasco?

Background of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) is an academic construct first formulated by Sue Bredekamp, Ph.D., of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Her book, called Developmentally Appropriate Practice, was first published in 1983. The book is now in its fourth edition.

To differentiate DAP from traditional educational methods, the NAEYC also developed the term “Developmentally Inappropriate Practice (DIP).” This was applied to methods including rote learning and memorization. Ignoring all the applications when memorizing is quick and effective, such as learning the multiplication tables or the names of the continents, and calling everything except DAP "developmentally inappropriate" demonized traditional methods of learning.

In 1983 the NAEYC was the foremost organization for daycare and preschool educators. Helping set policy has always been a cornerstone of their mission. Dr. Bredekamp led its accreditation department, creating the foundation for accreditation standards for early childhood educators and schools. This ensured that Developmentally Appropriate Practice would become entrenched in the educational system.

NAEYC's policies have been used by governments of all levels in developing curriculum and licensure requirements. Today its mission statement focuses on the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion—the DEI that has been discredited as being divisive and contrary to meritocracy.ⁱ However, their basic principles are fundamental to the organization and its practices.

What Is DAP?

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a brilliant Swiss scientist, identified the developmental stagesⁱⁱ that children go through. Today his work “is still an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law.”ⁱⁱⁱ Piaget’s work began as he observed his own three children. His principles are based on observation, not theory, and give wide developmental ranges, such as “birth to 2 years” and “ages 2 to 7.”

“Developmentally appropriate education,” on the other hand, is the theory that educators know what is appropriate for children based on “research, content areas, age, social-emotional learning, families, culture, and school communities.”^iv

Although the theory explains that teachers apply these principles, it does not explain how they can learn enough about each child’s family and culture to tailor education to each individual child, or how they would have the time to do so.

The theory was meant to improve educational outcomes of disadvantaged minorities, but like many progressive concepts this desire was poisoned by an underlying belief that minority children were less capable of learning than more advantaged: that their lack of school success must be because of innate differences in capability rather than poverty and a high rate of unwed motherhood.

Realistically, no teacher of a classroom full of students can possibly tailor education to each child’s level of social-emotional learning, family background, and culture. Despite the appealing academic jargon, in practice DAP means that children are introduced to information that NAEYC researchers have determined is suitable for children at each age.

The fact is that no one can identify what, how, or how much any child understands. Besides innate and cultural differences between people, everyone's capacity fluctuates hour to hour. If mental energy never flagged, Starbucks would be out of business.

What’s Wrong with DAP

The concept of "developmental appropriateness" is obviously nonsense because it assumes that professors can determine what is and is not appropriate for all children at all times and at different ages.

But this is not the worst.

DAP’s basic concept is shocking: challenging material hurts children. It's premise is that children flourish when they succeed at a task. While this is true, it is not the whole story. DAP assumes that struggling and “failing” discourages children and thus is destructive. This appears to be related to the failed “give everyone a trophy: philosophy.^v Thus in DAP classrooms, material is presented at such a level and in such a way that children do not fail. This is the very definition of “dumbing down.”

The belief that difficulty is harmful to children's learning is patently ridiculous. If it were true, no child would ever learn to walk. Anyone who has spent time with a young toddler knows that only after great effort and repeated failures are children able to walk securely. They are self-motivated in the struggle to walk. They do it because they want to, not because they are told to.

The same is true with children learning to catch or throw a ball. When playing catch with a parent, most children do not want to quit, no matter how badly they handle the ball. When after repeated failure they catch the ball, their joy is written all over their bodies.

The belief that children should be surrounded by success is the mindset under which red marking pens became taboo.^vi The belief is that papers marked with red may make school children feel badly about themselves. The same is true of giving failing grades to children who haven’t learned.

Developmental appropriateness steals natural curiosity from children because, in the formal educational setting at least, they are not exposed to things that they cannot comprehend intellectually, nor to tasks that children of their age rarely (if ever) can master.

Never having experienced negative experiences or consequences, many of today's young adults are psychologically weak. They need trigger warnings before hearing something that upsets them and "safe spaces" where negative information will not intrude.

Those who do not learn to make mistakes are not equipped for adult life, which includes making mistakes and failing. This can have tragic consequences. MIT, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and other elite colleges have higher than normal suicide rates. One reason, perhaps the major one, is that young people who were best in their high schools are competing for the first time with other students who were the best. That means some fail. And if it is for the first time, it can be devastating.

In DAP, failure became a monster to be avoided at all costs, instead of something that happens to everyone and can often be overcome by practice and persistence. Perhaps more importantly, the term “failure” is often used when the softer and more realistic term, “mistake,” could have been used. Mistakes are made in the course of completing a task, and they can be corrected. Failing is final.

Children think differently from adults

Anyone with experience with infants knows that babies start learning before birth: a newborn recognizes his mother’s voice.^vii Tiny babies learn how their fingers and toes work and that they can bring them to their mouths. But a child's understanding is not like an adult’s. A young child understand the here-and-now. Because of this, at a very young age children know that there are things they don’t understand. That's the mindset behind the exasperating question, "Why?" Their brains become filled with words that they know older people understand.

DAP and Student Apathy

Children are interested in learning more when they know there is more to learn. An example: parents of an 8-year-old boy with school issues sent him to private sewing lessons with me. He said he was not interested in sewing. Then I showed him some quilts I had made, and together we looked through a magazine of modern quilts. Suddenly he was excited by the possibilities of color, shape, and sewing. He needed to know there was more to learn before he wanted to learn more.

Without the dissonance between knowing something and knowing there is more to know about it, children have little curiosity. Children raised in developmentally appropriate classrooms are shielded from “complicated" and “difficult” information and projects which they cannot complete. In their immature minds, they are left with nothing to strive for.

No wonder they are apathetic in school.

A Different Educational Philosophy

In 1991 I studied a very different style of teaching, Workshop Way^(TM). After I completed an intensive seminar in using Workshop Way for preschool, I sat down with the Workshop Way preschool standards and those of the NAEYC. I wrote a ten-page comparison of the two methods. Unfortunately it was lost in one of my moves. But I remember the huge difference in the systems.

While DAP limits children's access to challenges, Workshop Way gives children a lot of freedom to try. One of its core beliefs is that mistakes are how we learn. Another is that everyone has their own time-clock for learning: we all learn at our own speed.

Photo of the author’s sign; thanks to Workshop Way for the motto.

These maxims are repeated to and by the children until they are firmly established within the children's minds. It creates children who are curious and not discouraged when their first or second attempt at a task is not successful. And slow students feel comfortable learning at their own pace.

When I had a sewing school, I had the "mistakes" maxim printed on a sign that hung in my classroom. When children got frustrated, I pointed to the sign. It freed children to learn.

I recently saw on Facebook a discussion on student apathy. One teacher wrote that one should say to students, Don't get discouraged by failure. But the stand-out words are "don't," "discouraged," and "failure." That statement projects a totally different belief about trial and error than Mistakes are how we learn, where the stand-out concept is "we learn."

Developmentally Appropriate Practice removes failure because it is negative, and the theory is built on the premise that teachers must protect children from the negative. The theory misses the point. Children learn faster and better when the fear of failure is removedwhile their curiosity and creativity are encouraged.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice Today

Today, NAEYC's focus is on diversity, equity and inclusion. The webpage makes this clear simply by the prevalence of nonwhite children and adults. Titles of its resources makes the point unmistakeable. But there are many troubling things about the webpage.

I studied this method back in the late 1980s when I considered returning to graduate school for a second degree in early childhood education (my master's degree is in elementary education). The importance of NAEYC was one reason I decided against it; I knew I could not participate in a field that was based so heavily on what was clearly a faulty philosophy.

When I first went onto the NAEYC web page this year, about six weeks after President Trump declared war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, I found that NAEYC's website is hiding important information. For example, the page “Topics in Developmentally Appropriate Practice" relies heavily on ellipses (…) showing that text is missing; the paragraphs as written are meaningless. When a nonmember clicks on the topic to get details, they find they cannot access the page.

One would think that NAEYC would want interested people to learn details of what they stand for. But only paid members can access this information without buying a book. One cannot even obtain membership information without first creating an account with more personal information than normally required on websites.

I suspect that NAEYC is deliberately hiding information to keep it from the Department of Government Efficiency. They undoubtedly have obtained federal funds that would be ended if DOGE discovered they still preach DEI.

Because so much information is hidden, I cannot tell whether the standards are as poor as they were 45 years ago, and I cannot be as explicit as I would like. But there is absolutely no evidence on their website that the organization has given up Developmentally Appropriate Practice.

Replace DAP

DAP is a practice that should be loudly repudiated and replaced by concepts developed by people who have watched toddlers learn to walk, extrapolating from that the understanding that almost all children try endlessly to succeed at something that they really want. Exposing them to interesting facts and experiences, even or perhaps especially those they cannot comprehend at an adult level, helps develop their innate curiosity. And children with innate curiosity that is not stifled by fear of failure make excellent learners.

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i President Trump has taken a firm stand against DEI and I am sure that the new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, will make ridding the US's education system of this destructive philosophy one of her main concerns.

ii Cherry, K., Piaget’s 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained: Background and Key Concepts of Piaget’s Theory, verywell mind, May 1, 2024, https://www.verywellmind.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-2795457, accessed March 10, 2025.

iii Jean Piaget Society, About Jean Piaget, https://piaget.org/about-piaget/, accessed March 9, 2025.

iv NAEYC Video Series: Joyful, Equitable Learning in Action: Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Action, a 1\37 minute video at

, accessed March 9, 2025.

v This theory appeared around the same time as the "self-esteem" movement, when every child started getting a trophy, regardless of the quality of their performance. I was unable to find the connection between the two theories, but I am sure there was one.

vi Google the term "red marking pens" and you will see many articles on this. It is no wonder that young adults are afraid of failure: they may have never experienced it before. They have no idea how much they know, either, since they were not graded on merit. I once asked a 9th grade sewing student what she had learned from me. I was shocked at her reply: she said that until I taught her to rip out sewing mistakes and redo the seam correctly, she never knew one could actually correct an error.

vii Does my baby recognize me? Yale Baby School, Yale University, https://babyschool.yale.edu/does-my-baby-recognize-me/, accessed March 10, 2025.