January 17, 2019
The most important number in America for our future as a country is the percentage of our children from every group who are learning ready at age four. We will be badly damaged as a country if we do not reduce the learning gaps in our schools. The learning gaps in our high schools today across the country are huge — and those gaps have...
October 29, 2018
We have important new information about the impact of racism on the preterm birth rates in our country. We now know that African American mothers who feel stress about the impact of racism on their children are more than twice as likely to give birth prematurely. We also now know that for infant mortality outcomes, the level of infant mortality goes down for our white...
April 16, 2018
The science of brain development for children is increasingly clear — and we have failed miserably in sharing that very clear and important science about the powerful impact of development activities in the first weeks, months, and years of life for each child in useful and effective ways with far too many families and parents in America. More than half of our births this year...
April 29, 2017
Dr. Beatrice Beebe and her team of researchers from Columbia University have written an amazing book that looks at the powerful and life changing impacts of mother-infant interactions in the first weeks and first months of life. Her book uses dozens of drawings done from video recordings of mother-child interactions taken at roughly 100 days old for each child, and shows how those mother-child interactions...
March 14, 2017
The attached Huffington Post piece that just ran explains the epigenetic reasons why the first three months of life are so important for every child born in America. We have new and important information about the huge impact of the first weeks and first months of life for every child — and now that we have that information and that knowledge — we need to share it...
February 16, 2017
The biggest single public health deficit and failure in America today is the fact that almost no parents of newborn children have been told or taught that they can improve their child’s learning abilities significantly by exercising their baby’s brain in the first three years of life. The basic biological science on that issue is absolutely clear — and almost no one is sharing that...
February 15, 2017
We have just done some work at the Institute for InterGroup Understanding we believe could actually help change the lives of large numbers of children for the better. We have just built and offered the world a new, easy to use Three Key Years website, which focuses entirely on helping parents and families from all groups build better lives for children by doing the right...
December 15, 2016
Governor Jerry Brown has just re-appointed me to serve for four more years on the First Five Commission for Children and Families for the State of California. I have been honored to Chair that Commission for the past four years, and I love the work that the Commission does and is doing. Thank you, Governor Brown. The people of California created First Five more than a...
November 1, 2016
We have massive learning gaps between groups of children in far too many schools in our country today. Efforts to close those gaps over the past two decades have very consistently failed. We have an economic reality where minority Americans have an average net worth that is less than 30 percent of the average net worth for White Americans. Unemployment levels are far higher for...
September 12, 2016
Sixty percent of African American males in this country who drop out of school end up in jail. The recidivism rate for those prisoners is nearly 80 percent. Those numbers are horrible. They result in damaging life trajectories for far too many. We can change those trajectories — but to change them, we need to make those changes for people in the very first weeks, months,...