One Day in Iraq

I found this video while researching my paper.  It beautifully illustrates two important concepts: issue framing and the completely F***ED up priorities our nation has when it comes to where to invest money.

By the way, it was created by a Quaker group that supports human rights.  Go Quakers!

Crafting efficient early intervention programs

Photo credit: Tony Tran

I stumbled on the website for Harvard's Center on the Developing Child while researching my paper and discovered an incredible resource within it.  One of the initiatives they are working on is a meta-analysis of efficacy in early intervention programs.  We've frequently discussed whether or not early intervention or programs such as Head Start/Early Head Start are effective over the long run.  The results of studies have indicated that, in large part, it depends on the program.  Blanket judgments such as "early intervention cannot give children long-term gains in development" are invalid due to the wide variety in program quality.  This initiative seeks to learn what makes a quality program, and how to help programs increase the quality of their care.

They have identified 5 factors:

1.  Small group sizes and high adult : child ratios
2.  Qualified and well-compensated personel
3.  Warm and responsive adult-child interactions
4.  A language-rich environment
5.  Safe physical environment

They have also identified 3 layers of programs to most effectively serve children living in different life conditions:

1.  General health and childcare (for all children)
2.  More broadly supportive programs for low-income families
3.  Targeted, more intensive interventions for children living with 'toxic stress' (drug exposure, foster care system, physical or sexual abuse, violent neighborhoods)

Here is a link to a video that explains this study.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

This is the study I mentioned in my last post.  It is such a strong testament to the necessity of infant mental health work in the field.  If nothing else, there exists an economic argument in terms of savings through preventative care.  If early childhood traumas are not addressed, the outcome usually involves multiple, chronic diseases and conditions.

Check out this PDF for a brief, easy to read summary of the work that this study has done and some economic costs of ignoring this issue.

From the ACE website:

What is the ACE Study?
The ACE Study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention and Kaiser Permanente.  Led by Co-principal Investigators Robert F. Anda, MD, 
MS, and Vincent J. Felitti, MD, the ACE Study is perhaps the largest scientific research study 
of its kind, analyzing the relationship between multiple categories of childhood trauma 
(ACEs), and health and behavioral outcomes later in life.


What's an ACE?
Growing up experiencing any of the following conditions in the household prior to age 18:

1. Recurrent physical abuse
   
2. Recurrent emotional abuse
   
3. Contact sexual abuse
   
4. An alcohol and/or drug abuser in the household
   
5. An incarcerated household member
   
6. Someone who is chronically depressed, mentally ill, institutionalized, or suicidal
   
7. Mother is treated violently
   
8. One or no parents
   
9. Emotional or physical neglect

The link between childhood trauma and adult health

My mom had a 'grandma moment' and clipped this article from her New Yorker to send to me.  As I read it, I literally started pumping my fist in the air in excitement.  It's about a pediatric health clinic in San Francisco, in the Bay View/Hunter's Point neighborhood.  The doctor who runs the clinic, Nadine Burke, understands that trauma in early childhood (whether it be from intra-uterine drug exposure, physical abuse, neglect, parental drug use or violence, or life in a series of foster placements) has physical ramifications later in life.  In fact, a longitudinal research project with thousands of participants done by Kaiser found there to be a very strong link between these factors occurring in early childhood and later development of asthma, heart disease, weight problems, depression, increases in risky behaviors, and earlier deaths.

And she is incorporating infant mental health into her medical practice!  Mind Body Awareness, biofeedback, parent-infant psychotherapy, and meditation/yoga classes are all available through this facility.   Check out the article here.  I want to work here!

What makes advocacy for disability rights so effective? Can early intervention learn a lesson here?

We frequently dwell and ruminate on the topic of budget cuts, poorly-written policy, and politicians who just don't seem to listen. Yet budgets keep getting cut, policy changes into yet worse permutations, and politicians still ignore us.  Sometimes, it seems that the early intervention community suffers from learned helplessness.  Yet advocates for disability rights have made tremendous strides in working towards legal and social equity.  What makes their work so effective? And what can those of us who advocate for children's rights learn from this?

Effective advocacy has many layers.

The first begins with education.
Knowing the history of your cause, the facts around your population of interest, who serves them, and where the money comes from makes you an informed advocate.  This is an area where early intervention could do more work, and where the disabilities, AIDS, and homelessness movements have excelled.

The next layer is community wrangling.  Connecting with local people.  Organizing neighbors in your community (with education as a goal), and making connections with others who are advocating in other places.  Examining successful advocacy in other cities and countries is a powerful tool for shaping your own campaign.  And, you know, the reason I'm writing this blog post.

Which leads to my next layer, forming a plan of action.  Effective advocacy has a strategy.  You can base  your strategies on those that have proven effective in the past.

The disabilities movement enlisted people who had the skills necessary to make a difference on a policy level.  I'm talking lawyers, local representatives, and the media.  They got laws passed and funds given.  They did this through inspiring parents of children with disabilities to take action.  They informed people with disabilities of their rights and created advocacy organizations to help fight for those rights when they were impinged upon.  

These are lessons early intervention can learn.  To some degree, these are things we are already working on.  The "Stroll-In for Head Start" created headlines in local news and demonstrated to legislators and senators that people care about early intervention.  And, in the latest round of the budget, Head Start and Early Head Start funds were protected.  But there is more we need to do.

Mindfulness and children

I thought this quote, by famous Buddhist philosopher and monk Thich Nhat Hahn, provides a very useful framework not only for working with our children, but also for considering how policy will affect our lives.  We are frequently frustrated, made to feel powerless, and otherwise disenfranchised from the world of those who write policy.  I am fascinated by the idea of thoughtful non-compliance, and I believe mindfulness is the way to truth within the structure of education policy.

"By paying attention to a thing and seeing it for what it is, rather than becoming drawn into its inertia, we are able to respond, rather than simply react.

According to the practice recommended by the Buddha, when the seed of anger or frustration is manifesting as a mental formation, we should not allow it to be there alone, we should try to invite another seed to manifest, usually we invite the seed of mindfulness to manifest.

The mindfulness is invited up in the mental formation as a kind of energy to recognize the other mental formation, we called it a practice of mindfulness of anger, mindfulness is always a mindfulness of something, when you breathe mindfully this is called mindfulness of breathing, when you walk mindfully that is a mindfulness of walking, when you are angry aware that you are angry, that is a mindfulness of anger.

The job of mindfulness is to recognize, to recognize things as they are, then to embrace whatever is there in a very tender way, like a mother embraces a child, when the child suffers, the mother is working in the kitchen but she hears the baby cry, she knows that the baby is suffering, so she goes into the baby room and she picks the baby up, she holds the baby tenderly in her arms, and the the energy of tenderness from the mother begins to penetrate into the body of the child, and after a few moments the child feels better. This also happens in the practice of mindfulness."

- Thich Nhat Hahn

On another note... Technology in Education

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com

I was interested in the concept of technology and education, and I found this wonderful experiment by Sugata Mitra. He put computers, connected to high-speed internet, tucked about three feet off of the ground in walls of slums in India, South Africa, and Italy.  Then he left them there, and with hidden cameras, recorded what children did with these computers.  All the children figured out how to use the internet, as well as improved their English, recorded songs, and recreated pictures. These results occurred when the children were left to learn on their own, without adults present or mandated lessons, and these results indicate a new era in education.

Also indicative of changes in the way we view teaching and education, schools in South Korea are considering rolling out a new, robotic English teacher.

While children report liking the robot teacher, what struck me was that the face on the robot is White, while the robot functions via teleconference with a teacher in the Philippines, who is not the woman pictured.  Apparently, not everything in education is changing. 

The Still Face Experiment

This is a clip from Dr. Edward Tronick's Still Face Experiments, which show emotional attunement between a parent and infant.  Particularly, it demonstrates the impact on the child of losing that attunement with his or her caregiver.  In the clip, you can see this child become increasingly stressed as her mother stops responding to her.

What interests me about these clips is the effect of stress and depression on the relationship between a baby and caregiver.  In class, we have been talking about the achievement gap between children from impoverished homes and those from financially stable homes.  Could family stress be one of the links between poverty and school performance?  When a child is stressed, they are less able to interact with the outside world.  That means, in school, they pay less attention and remember less information.  Children who are chronically stressed may perceive aggression where there is none, and may therefore be more likely to get into fights or to be reprimanded, eventually being labeled as 'bad kids'.  Stress, it turns out, has a huge impact on performance in social, academic, cognitive, and physical areas.  This argument presents evidence against a culture of poverty, and towards a culture of survival under poverty.

Neglect: A Slippery Concept in Foster Care

Neglect is one of the four categories of abuse that can cause a child to be removed from his or her home, and the most common type of child abuse.  However, neglect is a notoriously vague concept, highly dependent on cultural and social contexts and case workers' own perceptions.  As the US Department of Health and Human Services states, inconsistencies in the definition of neglect causes variability in the way that individual cases are handled, and removals from the home occur on a highly subjective basis. 


In many ways, the criteria for neglect closely mirror conditions of poverty: dangerous gas stoves, high windows without screens, rodent or  insect infestations, and the inability of caregivers to provide adequate clothing, food, or supervision for their children.  Yet the most concerning criteria for child neglect is homelessness. 


Situationally, homelessness can be considered grounds for removing a child from their parent's custody when the following are in place:

“unstable living conditions: change of residence due to eviction or lack of planning at least three times in a six month period or homelessness due to the lack of available affordable housing or the caregivers inability to manage finances." (Citation)

Considering the high number of homeless families in the United States, and how homelessness disproportionately affects people of color, a compelling argument can be made for the fact that racism is inherent in the foster care system. Additionally, thousands of families who have lost their homes in the economic downturn of 2009-2011 are now at risk for losing their children under this definition of neglect.

One person's judgement can make the difference between a shattered home and an intact one. Often, CPS case workers have little developmental training or awareness of family systems. Perhaps more rigorous standards for training and evaluation should be put into place, ensuring that poor families are not unjustly targeted and split apart due to their economic circumstances.

 

One more note about Head Start

Although my previous post took a more critical stance of the wording used in Head Start's policy guides, the program still does many wonderful things for families in the community.  And they are in danger of losing 25% of their funding (and all of the funding that keeps my center running!).

They are urging people to write to their congressfolk and urge them to vote against the budget proposal.  Here are the details and a link to a website where you can send an email to your congressional representative:

On Friday night (2/11/11), the U.S. House of Representatives introduced H.R. 1, a proposal to slash many important services during the current fiscal year.  This includes a nearly 22.4 percent cut to Head Start that would result in over 200,000 children losing services nationally (approximately 27,000 in California) and many Head Start employees losing their jobs.  The House will be debating and voting on the bill this week.

To be clear, this is not about ARRA expansion slots.  This is about core program funding in the current, FY 2011 budget.


Up until now, rhetoric in Washington about budget cutting has been in the abstract.  Now that House leaders have abruptly placed Head Start on the chopping block, we need to respond.  If adopted, this would be the largest cut in the history of Head Start.


Send an email today to your Member(s) of Congress urging them not to cut funding for Head Start.  It will only take 30 seconds to complete. Click here to send your Members of Congress the email

Are Hispanics an emerging commuinity?

I work at Early Head Start (EHS) as an intern, and so, I'm turning my blog towards thinking about federal infant and toddler care.  EHS provides developmental services to low-income children and is funded by local and federal sources.  But, knowing that EHS can't possibly serve all of the low-income families in America, how does it identify the populations that it does serve?

Community Assessments.   These are surveys of the level of need in a community which are submitted as part of grant proposals and thus, identifying populations in the community who are eligible for services is directly tied to program funding.  (Head Start centers operate locally, and must apply for federal funds once every three years).  These assessments are complex, long-term processes and, to help centers complete them, a guide to Community Assessments  (5 Steps to Community Assessment) has been published.

The latest version is subtitled: "a workbook for Head Start and Early Head Start programs serving Hispanic and other emerging populations."  But, wait a second, since when are Hispanics an emerging community?  Many of those we would categorize as part of that 'emerging' population have been a part of the population for the entirety of our national history.  Perhaps the writers were too wary of the politically-charged term 'immigrant' to state it outright in the title, but the term is sprinkled liberally throughout the document and from the context, the intention of helping centers locate immigrants with needs for developmental services is clear.

The use of this term de-centers the experience of the Hispanic in America.  Although overtaking caucasians in the national population, the normative experience in America is still that of the white child. The use of a term such as 'emerging' reinforces the concept that this country is dominated by populations other than Hispanic ones as well as displays a bias against the acceptability of immigrant/migrant status.

Here is the link for the Community Assessment guide

Attack of the Fat Babies!

On the one year anniversary of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative to fight childhood obesity, a new study has come out that links infant obesity to the timing of solid food introduction.  The study found that children introduced to solid foods (eg. cereal, fruit, peanut butter, vegetables, eggs, and meat) before four months of age were more likely to be classified as obese at the age of three.  The researchers also found that children who were breastfed were less likely to be obese at three.

Is it rational to worry about obesity in infants?  Possibly.  There are strong links between childhood obesity and adult obesity, and Oken, et al. (2007) found that the amount of weight gained during pregnancy was correlated with childhood obesity.  Yet studies such as these also smack of media-induced panics, potentially magnifying small effects to improve readership.  Overall, a healthy lifestyle continues to be the best predictor of health throughout life.  Ms. Obama may have the right idea by encouraging Americans to get moving.


Link to the article: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110207-700064.html

Infant Car Seats on Airplanes

Here is an interesting article about a mother who, after purchasing an additional seat on an airplane for her infant car seat, was escorted off the plane because the seat was too big for the row.  What I find incredible about this is not that this mother was asked to switch flights to a larger airplane, but that the FAA is trying to advance policy that would make it mandatory for parents travelling with infants to buy separate seats for their babies.  Flying is expensive as hell these days, and it's no secret that airlines are struggling to (pardon the pun) stay afloat.  Is this a case of genuine concern for child safety?  Or another money-making scheme that plays off of parents' worst fears?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2014090462_webchildseats31.html

By the way... the odds of dying in a car crash during your life are about 1 in 158.

And the odds of dying in a plane crash during your life? 1 in 66,000.


**UPDATE**

January 28th, 2011: Green Bay Packers fan needs Super Bowl ticket for infant

Issues such as this face new parents on a daily basis, yet so many policies surrounding infants and young children are based on financial, rather than developmental or family-first rational.  This blog will focus on matters of policy that affect young children and their families, and seek to provide an alternate perspective on the policies that shape our lives.