To Serbia… And Back

Thanks to Texans Care for Children, another tip for putting kids first.

#2 Way to Put Kids 1st: See things from a child’s point of view.

Many of us feel like we know a thing or two about child development, having been children at some point ourselves. With startling regularity, though, scientists and educational psychologists discover new breakthroughs, improving our understanding of how children’s minds work, often quite differently from adults’.

If adults used that knowledge in interactions with children, widespread benefits could follow. Consider research from the New York University Child Study Center that found an easy, effective way to help children is educating their parents about how kids think, grow, and learn at various developmental stages. Kids whose parents had received education like this exhibited lower levels of stress and aggression, were less likely to be obese during childhood, and had higher standardized test scores later in life than at-risk children whose caregivers did not receive child development lessons.

It stands to reason that other influential grown-ups—teachers, relatives, neighbors, all of us—also can contribute to a better life for more children when we know how children learn and grow. Hundreds of thousands of new moms and dads in Texas receive A Parent’s Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy Children, a developmental “calendar” that takes adults through each stage of a child’s development from 0-5, with tips from the child’s point of view. Produced by Texans Care for Children, the guide is also available as a PDF download in both English and Spanish to help you learn about a growing young child in your life.

Mid-term elections are approaching, and everyone is mad about something. Economy hasn’t recovered, jobs are scarce, the housing market is in a slump, the economic gap between the rich and the rest of us seems to be growing every day. Incumbents and the new Tea Party activists trying to replace them have stirred up contention in every political debate these days. Not unusual for an election year of course. But missing from every discussion I have heard recently is any focus on what’s good for kids. There is still kid related news of course – a recent bullying-related suicide got some attention on Facebook, the recently released Waiting for Superman movie discusses the plight of public education. But with a war (or is it two?) and an economic environment in which people aren’t making as much money as they would like, who has time to care about child poverty, teen pregnancy, child mental health, or parenting? These are the issues, though, that should be first in the minds of American leaders. If, as a country, we can not take care of our children, then what is the point of trying to take care of anyone else?

I appreciate Texans Care for Children’s weekly email messages called “Putting Kids First” – reminding us of the simple things we can do every day to keep the kids we know healthy. The suggestions are simple, and what most of us do anyway for our kids. The important thing about getting these reminders is to remember that with all the depressing things in the news, the helplessness I feel in the face of most issues I read about these days (especially in my role as full-time mom, disheveled, exhausted, mentally spent every day), the little things I can do for my kids are just as important (or maybe more important!) than any campaign I could run to end poverty to prevent abuse. My part matters, and so does yours.

In that light, I want to help spread Texans Care’s message by reposting their reminders for Putting Kids First here. Go ahead, take the pledge to put kids first in your life and work. (Now back to my toddlers, who are crawling all over me as I type this! Seems there are some diapers to change.)