I am working at YMCA daycare in my home town of Galesburg, Illinois to do my field experience. We have ages of children from 6 weeks up to 5 years old in our center. The staff at The Y includes all levels of early childhood professionals from CDA to Associates Degree to Bachelors degree. I wasn't sure who would be the best to interview so I asked everyone what their thoughts were on issues in Early Childhood. Everyone agreed that parental involvement is definately a big issue. this would also relate to the issue of reading to children that I am contemplating on writing about. Deb, who has a CDA says "parental involvement is an issue now because parents work schedules interfere with them being involved and they lack the materials like books." (D. Raes, personal communication, Jan. 14 2013)  One more issue that they all agreed on is the lack of respect for others that the children seem to have right now. All in all, i am hearing, parental involvement, lack of respect and my own choice of reading to children. I don't think that i am going to let these interviews influence me too much on choosing a topic for my advocacy plan. I really feel that the choice that I decided on comes from the heart and I would be very passionate and interested in this topic.
Reading to your children is important and several related topics come to mind. One of them being the skills/ benefits that they gain from being read to at an early age. Second, the reasons why children are not being read to and what we need to do to change this. Third, parental involvement is a related issue in reading to children. Early Childhood educators can encourage parents to do this by sending home activities  and books to read.
 I have a good topic but I need to do some more research on the subject to become a better advocate. This should be an interesting time this quarter.