Children's experiences are more consequential than
we ever thought. We know that the brain develops the most in the first five
years of life. By age 6, 95% of a child's brain is already developed. By age 6!
So these early years are very, very important. And of all people, not just
parents, pediatricians and teachers, but economists are paying attention.
Neural synaptic connections are occurring in a child's brain age zero to three
at a rate of 700 a second. The worst fallacy in this business is to assume that
the abilities, the motivations, the skills of people are fixed at birth - they
are not. What happens in that 36-month period is important as far as whether a
child is going to be trusting and curious, and active and able to interact with
other people in a productive way ( raising children).
What I came to understand was that ability was
multiple in nature, that you could actually start, even at the earliest years,
shape the ability, and increase the possibilities of individuals for their
life. So that became very exciting to me.
Here I am, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, my expertise is
pre-Civil War banking, I worried a lot about business cycles and financial
crises, and unemployment and inflation. How does somebody with that background
get involved with early childhood, prenatal to five? You have to figure out
what's the best investment? It's going to be early childhood education.
Making sure these kids start healthy and ready to
learn. Science has demonstrated that a child's earliest experiences are vital
to building the foundation for life-long individual success in school and in
life. We can put dollar values on almost anything. Economists are adding new
data to this argument, studying two initiatives in particular: high-quality
early care and preschool, calculating how much they cost, and how much they pay
off to our economy. And they're worried. Not because we're spending too much,
but because we're spending too little where it matters most.
You can make moral arguments for Higher Ed, for
K-12, for reducing crime, for reducing pollution. But policy makers need more
than moral arguments. We asked a very direct question that most economists or
business people would ask: "What was the return on the investment?"
The first study to catch the attention of Rolnick and other economists was from
a high quality early childhood experiment for low-income children in Ypsilanti,
Michigan, called Perry Preschool. Founded in 1962, Perry Preschool grew out of
the spirit of that time - the growth of the civil rights movement,
desegregation and equal opportunity. The Perry children had master's level
teachers and low student-to-teacher ratios. Educators even visited the families
at home every week ( raising children).
The children that were receiving the Perry
intervention received three hours per day of a cognitively rich preschool
program. They focus on things such as math, literacy, play-based approaches,
focus on engaging their imagination and their own investment in their learning.
The Perry kids were compared to a group of their peers, a control group, who weren't
in the program. Both groups have been followed for 40 years. They found that
the children that were in the high-quality program were less likely to be
retained in the first grade, were less likely to need special ed,
were more likely to be literate by the sixth
grade, graduate high school, get a job, pay taxes, and start a family ( raising children).
This is Adam Norman, a 30-year-old father and a journalist. I consider being a father as my full-time duty, which comes before my actual job of journalism. As a father, there will always be new challenges for me to face everyday while raising my kids. This is where the idea of this website came from. I wanted to give out my experience, along with the experience of others, to all parents out there who need an advice with raising their kids.
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