Giving our Children a Head Start

If there was a program that reduced child obesity rates by 99%, kept kids in school longer, decreased welfare and dependency rates, reduced teen pregnancies by 50%, and saved the tax payers $7.00 for every dollar invested, wouldn’t that be a program that ought to be implemented across our nation? Such an initiative does exist in a smattering of places across North America. It is the Head Start program. At its root, the program focuses on better parenting, and enabling children to grow up in nurturing environments where their basic needs are met.

Normal psychological development is obviously threatened when a child is exposed to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, experiencing victimization by others, and poor nutrition. More subtle factors, however, such as a lack of supervision from caring adults, parental rejection, and inconsistent care can also have devastating effects on a child’s development. One of these factors alone will not normally cause psychological damage, but an accumulation of these risk factors will. Therefore, ensuring that a child can live in an environment where their basic needs are met, and disruptions to their psychological development are minimized, has proved to be extremely worthwhile.

The program focuses on bringing parents into schools to work with their children on literacy, nutrition, physical activity and proper parenting. The children and parents both learn skills that they can use at home; taking children out to play rather than endlessly sitting in front of the TV or computer screen; eating well; and reading and being read to. This week we celebrated the International Day of the Child, a reminder that too many children in our country go to bed with empty stomachs, go to school hungry, and lack the basic necessities to support their development and enable them to have the psychological pillars to adjust to the difficult challenges their life produces.

Canada needs a national Head Start program. Provincial governments across our country struggle with an array of challenges that put huge demands on social programs, justice programs, and the economy. The federal government, while not primarily responsible for these areas, also pays money to the provinces to deal with the effects of children not growing up in an environment in which their basic needs are met and where their neurological development occurs in a sustainable way. The failure to implement a Head Start program will result in too many children enduring lives that are far less than what they could be. Implementation of such a program will give children the head start they need in life and enable them to be productive, engaged adults in Canadian society. This is one program that we cannot afford not to implement. Doing this is a matter of leadership, a matter of foresight, and a matter of common humanity towards the most vulnerable amongst us, our children.

-Keith

Giving our Children a Head Start

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Health, In Our Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.