NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct: What It Means for Teachers

The NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct is the ethics code for people who work in early childhood education.

Its current edition was approved by NAEYC's Governing Board in July 2025 under a new title — the Code of Ethics for Early Childhood Educators — and the previous version was the 2011 Code of Ethical Conduct.

If your orientation packet or an old course syllabus still says Code of Ethical Conduct, it is describing an older edition, not a different document.

The code covers educators who work with children from birth through age 8, in all early childhood settings — a span that runs from infant rooms through the early elementary years.

NAEYC publishes it in its position statements library, alongside its other guidance for the field.

The code has been revised repeatedly: the original Code of Ethical Conduct was approved in 1989, and revisions were approved in 1992, 1997, 2005 and 2011.

The 2025 edition continues that pattern of periodic revision — which is why the familiar title and the title NAEYC now uses are not the same.

In day-to-day terms, NAEYC publishes the code as professional guidance for the field, and it is not a state licensing rule.

NAEYC also runs an accreditation system for early learning programs, but that is a separate quality-review track.

If you meet the code in an orientation packet, in coursework, in a program handbook or in an interview question about ethical dilemmas, its job is the same: to give you a shared vocabulary for the calls a policy manual does not answer — when two good things conflict, which one comes first?

The role the code speaks to — what a daycare teacher does, the requirements to get hired and the pay — is covered in the daycare teacher career guide.

A code of ethics does a specific job for a working teacher: it names the commitments the profession shares, so a hard decision can be tested against something steadier than a mood, a hunch or whoever argued longest at nap time.

A code earns its keep on the calls where two good things conflict — a family's request against a child's needs, a colleague's privacy against a child's safety — rather than on obvious right-and-wrong.

What we can state about this code is what NAEYC's own materials verify: its scope (educators working with children from birth through age 8, in all early childhood settings), its publication in NAEYC's position statements library, and its revision history through the July 2025 edition.

The sources we reviewed do not lay out the 2025 document's structure section by section.

If you need to cite a specific value or section — in coursework, a handbook or an interview answer — read the current Code of Ethics for Early Childhood Educators on naeyc.org rather than an older summary of the 2011 edition.

One useful way to map daily practice is in four directions: toward children, toward families, toward colleagues, and toward the community and the profession itself.

Those are the areas the next section walks through — and they give you a workable shape for an interview answer too.

The ethical weight of a classroom job lands in four places.

Here is what each direction asks of a teacher in practice.

• Children — safety, development and dignity come first. When the interests of adults and children collide, the child's comes first; that is the test each example below turns on. NAEYC's developmentally appropriate practice position statement states the underlying commitment: each child from birth through age 8 has the right to equitable learning opportunities, in centers, family child care homes or schools.
• Families — partnership and confidentiality. You hold private information as a routine part of the job. O*NET lists keeping records on individual children — daily observations, activities, meals served, medications given — and communicating with parents about daily activities and behaviors among childcare workers' tasks, and preschool teachers also meet with parents about progress. Ethically, that information flows through the family and your program's channels, not through the parking-lot conversation with a curious neighbor.
• Colleagues — respect and honesty. Co-teachers, assistants, aides and floaters share the room and the responsibility. The working ethic is to communicate directly, share credit, never undermine a colleague in front of the children, and raise a real concern with the colleague or the director rather than around them.
• Community and the profession — you represent the field. An article published on naeyc.org, by Derman-Sparks and Olsen Edwards, names four core goals of anti-bias education — identity, diversity, justice and activism — that anti-bias work in a classroom builds toward. And following your state's licensing rules even when it is inconvenient is the floor of professional conduct, not the ceiling.

Ethics questions get concrete fast in a center.

These examples show the shapes they take, and the reasoning that holds up under pressure.

• Someone asks about a child who is not theirs. A neighbor, a relative, a family friend: 'How is he doing, really?' The records you keep on individual children belong with the child's family and your program's process. A warm 'that is for his mom or dad to share' is an ethical answer, not a rude one.
• You see a developmental concern the family does not. Screening runs with families, not around them: ASQ-3, a screening tool used in early childhood, is a parent-completed questionnaire that professionals score. The ethical move is honest, kind information through your program's process — never a label delivered at pickup, and never a quiet promise to keep it 'just between us.'
• You are pressured to move a child out over behavior. HHS and ED's joint policy statement on expulsion and suspension, published in 2014, urges states to establish policies across public and private early childhood programs that eliminate or severely limit both, using them only as a last resort when safety is seriously threatened, and ACF's November 2016 information memo encouraged state CCDF lead agencies to adopt those recommendations. The equity stakes are documented: Office for Civil Rights data cited in that 2016 memo showed African-American boys were 19% of preschool enrollment but 45% of preschoolers suspended. Mind the scope — these are recommendations and encouragement, not binding rules for a private center, and discipline rules come from your state child care licensing agency.
• Loyalty to a colleague conflicts with duty to children. A co-teacher skips a step in a safety routine when the room is stretched thin. Professional ethics resolves it cleanly: children's safety is not a favor you owe a colleague. Fix it in the moment, raise it privately with the colleague, and bring in the director if it repeats.
• A family's request conflicts with good practice. 'Just drill him on letters, he's behind.' The developmentally appropriate practice lens is the working answer: weigh what children that age share, what this particular child brings, and the family's context, inside the commitment to equitable learning for each child. You may not win the argument, but you can explain your reasoning and bring the director in when a request would compromise a child's experience.

Professionalism in early childhood education is less a certificate on the wall than a set of routines: the daily record you keep on each child, the progress conversation you hold with a parent instead of avoiding, the safety step you do not skip when the room is short-staffed.

NAEYC publishes a companion document for exactly this: the Professional Standards and Competencies for Early Childhood Educators (2020), a set of six standards for the field whose sixth is 'Professionalism as an Early Childhood Educator.' It is a different document from the code of ethics — the standards name what educators study and do; the code describes how they conduct themselves when practice gets hard.

Keeping credentials current is part of the same habit.

BLS notes that when states require a nationally recognized credential for childcare workers, it is most often the Child Development Associate (CDA), which must be renewed every 3 years — a renewal cycle, not a one-time hurdle.

The code also pays off at hiring time.

Asked in an interview how you handled an ethical dilemma, the strong answer names the two goods in tension, says which you put first and why — the child — and describes the adults you looped in.

If you are applying for daycare teacher jobs, build your ethics answer on exactly that child-first reasoning; the same habit reads as professionalism once you are in the room.

For the teaching framework that runs alongside the code, see the guide to developmentally appropriate practice.

This page is career information, not licensing or legal advice. For the rules that bind a licensed child care classroom, confirm with your state child care licensing agency.