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Subject: Greta G. Fein; Professor Emeritus, UIniversity of Maryland Expert On Childhood Development


Author:
Florida
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Date Posted: January 11, 2005 11:24:19 EDT

Greta G. Fein, 75, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland who conducted groundbreaking research on early childhood education and children's play and storytelling, died Dec. 14 in Sarasota, Fla., of emphysema. She was a former resident of Seabrook.

At the University of Maryland, Dr. Fein helped establish the Center for Young Children, a model teaching and research laboratory. She also designed observational studies of children's play. These studies demonstrated the importance of imagination and storytelling in children's emotional and intellectual development. She was a passionate advocate for responsive teaching and creative, play-oriented approaches to early childhood education.

Dr. Fein was born in Queens, N.Y., and attended Queens College, where she was active in the political causes of the day, including protests of racial segregation at the local YMCA and the firing of professors accused of being communists. She received a master's degree from Bank Street College of Education. After her marriage in 1957, she moved to Salt Lake City, where she raised three children and taught kindergarten.

In 1964, the family moved to New Haven, Conn., where she was accepted into Yale University's doctoral program in psychology. She received her doctorate in 1969, and worked on observational studies of children's play. She co-authored the landmark Day Care in Context, an assessment of day care on children, published in 1973. She advised the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare on child-care issues and championed the cause of active parent involvement in day-care centers in the 1980 article "The Informed Parent."

From 1975 to 1980, she was director of child development research at Detroit's Merrill-Palmer Institute.

In 1980, she accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland School of Education and moved to Seabrook.

She became prominent in the debate concerning whether enrollment in day care damages children's attachment to their parents. She played a leading role in documenting what she considered the weakness of evidence for the "attachment thesis," urging researchers and policymakers to address instead the need for quality early education programs.

Dr. Fein retired in 1999 and took on a new project -- a psychological study of mystery novels by female authors about female sleuths. At the time of her death, she had amassed data on 236 novels by 63 writers. "The feminist side of me is unendingly gleeful to think that our society has become bold enough to imagine so huge an array of personages that women are and can become," she wrote in regard to the heroines she had researched.

An avid tennis player, she was a member of the Aspen Hill Racquet Club in Silver Spring and the Serendipity Racquet Club in Sarasota, where she began spending winters in the 1980s. She became a year-round resident of Siesta Key, Fla., in 2002. She also traveled extensively.

Dr. Fein's marriages to Harry Fein and Saul Wellman ended in divorce.

Survivors include three children from her first marriage, Debby Brug of Hopkinton, Mass., David Fein of Kensington and Joshua Fein of Albuquerque; and three grandsons.

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