Caring for Our Young Children

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. And now, here is our host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy Devitt-Griggs. Well, Dr. Katherine Stevens is the founder and CEO of the brand new Center on Child and Family Policy. She previously served as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where she led their early childhood program. Dr. Katherine Stevens, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

Thanks so much. I'm delighted to be here. All right, so start off, why do you consider now to be a pivotal moment for early childhood? Over the last 10 years or so, there's just been such a growth in awareness of how crucial the first period of human development is as a foundation for the rest of people's lives.

There's been a rapidly growing body of brain science that helps us understand that, and it's heaped its way into both the policy sphere and the sort of general public awareness. So we're just now really recognizing that this is a policy area that matters a great deal and that we haven't thought enough about. So is this part of the reason why you started the Center for Child and Family Development?

Yes, absolutely. We're just now coming to understand that this is really important. There's been a big increase in policy attention, media attention to early childhood, so I think it needs more attention. At the same time, I'm hoping that the Center on Child and Family Policy will be able to provide a platform which is focused less on politics, less on programs, and more on what needs to happen to ensure that all young children have the opportunity to thrive. So our goal, our North Star, is the healthy development and well-being of young children.

So that's going to drive everything that we're doing. There's just not enough organizations out there that are working in this space and taking that kind of approach. Okay, and we will get to that because I think a lot of people want to hear, what can I be doing with my own children at home, with my grandchildren? But North Carolina Family Policy Council is a public policy organization, so let's talk about that first and a little bit more. Why is public policy something we cannot ignore when we're talking about early childhood development? Our lives are influenced to such a degree now by policy, right, that kind of touches every area of our lives.

And there's kind of two things. One is we're seeing that we're not doing a good enough job to ensure that all young children are developing well. We're seeing a lot of kids having a lot of problems these days. And I worry that our inclination is to extend policies that we're familiar with for older children, extend those younger and younger and younger.

And that's just not the right approach for very early development. So that, to me, is really the key issue, that we need to be thinking about early childhood, from prenatal, say, to age five, as very unique, absolutely crucial phase of life that we have to be thinking about in a whole new way. And I think it's important for people who are listening to understand, I mean, you're Ivy League. I mean, you were educated at Columbia University, got a couple degrees, I think, from there. So your perspective is not one necessarily as an outsider from some of these more what we might consider to be sort of liberal leanings in some of this training.

I mean, you're seeing this from having probably been immersed in it. So I think that's important. It sounds like you're suggesting we need an adjustment to the lens by which we're looking at early childhood policies.

Do you have some specifics? Yes. What I'm seeing is that we are conflating, we've been for a long time now, conflating human development with schooling. So the way that early childhood is framed is with what you might describe as a schoolified lens. We've really for the last half century have seen the public schools as the vehicle for human development.

And, you know, it's not always been that way. It was really in the 1960s under Lyndon B. Johnson that this idea became a cornerstone of our thinking, that the public schools would play such a huge role in addressing poverty, advancing opportunity, and really serving as a primary kind of human development vehicle. So as we're now understanding that children are in fact learning from birth, because we've come in this way to conflate learning with school, which is actually incorrect to some considerable degree for older kids as well, now we're thinking, oh, well, if they're learning from birth, they need to be in school from birth.

And that's actually completely incorrect in terms of what we know about early development. And that thinking is narrowing our policy focus to expanding non-parental group programs at the expense of other really crucial parts of young children's lives, and in particular the healthcare system, early health, and most importantly, families. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast of the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens across North Carolina about policy issues that impact North Carolina families. Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished. For more information about NC Family and how you can help us to achieve this incredible vision for our state and nation, visit our website at ncfamily.org. Again, that's ncfamily.org. And be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts, and of course our flagship publication, Family North Carolina Magazine.

We'd also love for you to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now, what do you say to people, and I've even had, I had a pediatrician say to me one time, yeah, it's great for you, you know, for your children to be home because you're spending time with them, but there's so many children that they're just lumps on a log, you know, all day long at home. The parents park them in front of television. So how do you address those kind of concerns when they come up? There's a large group of people who are home with their young children. And thing one is I think we need to be acknowledging and recognizing what an enormous contribution people, parents, mothers or fathers who are doing that are making. I worry that we're not celebrating enough that, you know, we're not talking forever, but staying home for two or three or four years with young children is enormously important work. It's not paid work, but that doesn't mean it's not crucially important work. And the point isn't to pay it.

The point is to recognize how crucially important it is to our society. So that's one group of people. There's another group of people who wish they could stay home with their own kids, but they can't, you know, a two earner family where if one of them stops working, they're going to literally go into poverty. So I am hoping that we can start thinking in more creative ways, not about how to help that family pay for strangers to care for their children, but how we can help them for two or three or even four years raise their kids themselves if they want to. Then there's a group of people who you just described who may not know or be able to do the kinds of parenting that children benefit from. And I actually think that pediatricians, that our health care system, which, you know, all children, essentially every young child in the whole country and their mother at least, interact with the health care system. And I think we're underutilizing that system for parent education to help parents understand how absolutely crucial they are and what that means, the consequences, you know, for better or for worse and kind of what that looks like.

And again, not forever, but for this really relatively short period of time. And then there's this last group of children who are living with one parent and our general understanding is that that parent needs to be supporting the family. Those children are often very poor and that's actually a group where I think we should be focusing our effort in terms of child care to make sure that a five month old baby from a family that's quite poor with a mother who's having to work full time is in our interest. And I think it demonstrates respect and appropriate support for the mother to ensure that that child is in a really high quality environment.

So that's like kind of a separate case. That does not to me mean that the solution to this question across the board is non-parental group care for every child. For a lot of children that's not optimal and it's not what their parents want. But you know, I think what we need more focus on is helping parents understand how young children's brains develop.

They develop through ongoing, relatively intensive, responsive, nurturing interaction, starting pretty much when they're born. So having eye contact with your baby, talking to your baby, kind of the role that you play not just in making sure that they have good sleep hygiene, but for people in the healthcare system to be kind of relentlessly emphasizing the interactions that children need to have with their parents and other close family members around them. That being on your cell phone instead of interacting with your baby is actually, we could almost go so far as to say it's actually damaging the child's development. And that kind of knowledge I think could be enormously empowering for parents because I think they underestimate how much just having eye contact with the baby and going back and forth in baby talk, that is actually the primary driver of brain development. Talk a little more about that because what does that do?

So we're not talking about it doesn't matter what the parent's educational level is necessarily, even what they're saying. What does it do? Does it open up physiologically? What does it do to develop the brain? We are profoundly interactive beings. We are hardwired to develop through our interactions with other humans.

And as a matter of fact, if you look at other animals, you look at monkeys, you look at elephants, you can see that that's typical, that this kind of close nurturing interaction is how we develop. Just very quickly, a baby is born with about 100 billion brain cells, which is essentially the same brain cells that our brains have. However, what's crucial about the way a brain functions is the connections between the brain cells called synapses. When a baby is born, there are very few connections between the brain cells.

So they have the brain cells but not the connections. So starting actually before birth, there's a very rapid process that is literally wiring the brain that starting at birth about a million new connections per second are being developed. And what research has shown is that, as I said, the primary driver of forming those new connections is through human interactions and language-based. So even before a baby is saying words that you understand, that the process of the baby makes a sound or says something and you reflect that, you say something back, that interaction is babies live for that. So if you're with a baby, you'll see the joy that kind of interaction brings to a baby.

And what the brain science is showing us is that that is actually what is building the synapses, the connections between brain cells for the first several years of life. Before we go, Catherine Stevens, where can our listeners go to learn more about this fascinating topic but also your newly established Center for Child and Family Policy? They can go to www.ccfp.org, which is our website. And I am on Twitter at KBStevens. And we're eager for people to get in touch with ideas, questions. We're eager to be in touch with people.

All right, sounds good. Dr. Catherine Stevens, CEO of the recently established Center on Child and Family Policy. Thanks so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to this show online and to learn more about NC Family's work to inform, encourage, and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening, and may God bless you and your family. .