Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin

Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin, M.Ed. is a founding teacher of the Mission Hill K-8 School. She serves as the Director of Defending the Early Years and Empowered by Play, which she also founded in 2009. Ms Bywater McLaughlin, a teacher-turned-activist, became a play advocate in response to her classroom observations of children forced to grow up too quickly in the current commercialized, plugged-in culture.

Knocking over a virtual tower is not the same kinesthetic experience as knocking down a real block tower. Touching a worm on a screen is not the same thing as holding a wiggling worm in your hand. Not even close. It worries me when early childhood professionals describe their teacher-directed Smart Board literacy lessons as “engaging students holistically.” They are not.
~ Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin

Geralyn is also a contributing writer to So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids by Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne. Geralyn is a featured writer at Empowered By Play. Her work also appears on the pages of Rethinking Schools, and in The Washington Post. Please read How Ed Policy Is Hurting Early Childhood Education, By Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Diane E. Levin and Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin.

A classroom teacher for 19 years, Geralyn is also a mother of nine-year-old twin boys. Motherhood too informs and inspires her thinking.

The most developmentally appropriate technology we have for preschoolers and kindergartners have been our tried and true technologies such as crayons, balls and blocks. Add nature, and you have all the materials you need.
~ Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin