electronic
naif
The Status Quo
is NOT
Acceptable.
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A simple statement.
We could change the world in a generation.
It only requires that we prioritize what we should be prioritizing from the beginning.
Children are the future.
We should give them every support.
It does require a major cost in infrastructure and support but the economic, health and social benefits will more than justify the investment.
The health of the mother and the involvement of the parents is the first essential element. Prenatal care to insure a healthy mother and baby followed by postnatal support.
Research on the value and importance of high-quality early education programs gives a glimpse of the potential that high quality early support of infant care would have on life-cycle benefits.
We the government, society, should set up the best prenatal, birth and post natal facilities for all.
Providing free prenatal care by explaining issues and supplying information to the mother with regular appointments focusing on her health, nutrition, development of the fetus and expectations for the birth.
Followed up by support at home for the introduction of the new born into the family. Also supported with camps and clinics for the developing child to socialize with same age groups, allowing assessment of developmental benchmarks. Training and suggestions should be available on any needed subjects including food and sleep issues.
A facility needs to be provided for these activities. Developmental disabilities can be recognized early and help offered for both physical and mental disabilities. Outliers can be acknowledged and responded to as part of the norm, not ostracized.
Socializing through game play and shared experience, appropriate challenges to encourage curiosity, alone and with groups while establishing a culture where the older teach the younger will foster a sense of significance and belonging.
The facility could also be a community center with the base activities and the ability of the local participants to shape and develop other programs for older children and adults. Volunteers can be encouraged to share what they have experienced, pay it forward as part of the neighborhood.
We will be a better society with an emphasis on better parenting and shared experience.
This is a basis for a complete restructuring of everything
to achieve a sustainable quality of life for the commons.
Infants want consistency and to be secure. With that they can thrive.
The key to giving infants and toddlers a head start in developing their early language/literacy skills is: “winning their heart in order to reach their mind.” Seeing an infant’s eyes widen as you approach them or seeing a toddler come to you for a hug are ways that you know you have “won their hearts.”
An important goal for teachers of infants and toddlers is building positive and trusting relationships with all children. This early social bond will naturally motivate them to use gestures, sounds, and/or words when interacting with you. Early sounds will turn into words and words into sentences, which are the basic elements of early language development.
From Keith Turner's PHILOSOPHY: WINNING THE CHILD’S HEART
What is turning out from this body of research is that promoting engagement of children, their cognitive and non-cognitive skills, boosting their IQs, at the same time boosting their social engagement, their willingness to participate in society, monitoring their health from an early age, is having huge benefits downstream for the rest of their lives.
You can actually monetize the cost of the criminal justice system, the cost of incarcerating people and so forth. You can also talk about the benefits of reduced healthcare expenditures, higher-quality of life and so forth. All of that's incorporated into our rates of return and benefit-cost ratio. Breaking out these components, one of the most surprising findings from a study that we did published in Science magazine a couple of years ago. We showed that children who are in this program were much less likely to be obese, to have hypertension, to have precursor environments that would promote diabetes.
Interview with James Heckman, co-author of The Life-Cycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program