Blog

We Need to Fix This Now

May 6, 2019

The situation we face as a country is extremely serious.

We have massive learning gaps in our schools, and those gaps are getting worse because we have growing numbers of children being born into the low end of those gaps, and their lives will be damaged in permanent ways by not being able to do basic things that need to be done for both employment and education.

The majority of students in far too many schools cannot read or do computations at grade level in high school, and the number of students who are on the low end of those learning gaps is growing at a very dangerous rate.

We tend to want to avoid looking at those issues or even thinking about those issues, but the sad truth is that we will condemn and doom ourselves to be a country with a future of significant functional failure, dysfunctional, damaging and divisive inter group interactions, destructive and sometimes situationally crippling inter group divisions, and far too many levels of deep seated and deeply embedded inter group conflict and anger unless we intervene now in very doable ways to change that future for us as a country.

The majority of births in America in 2019 will be in our Medicaid program. That fact gives us a very good set of tools that we can use relatively quickly and directly to change life trajectories for many children — but that will not happen unless we all understand the tools and make the official and collective decision now to use them as soon as possible to help our children.

We have children who are being unintentionally and individually damaged by the millions in ways that will ensure that they have extremely difficult lives and who will often be angry as adults at the situations they will face relative to their own health, economic status, and rates of both unemployment and incarceration.

That set of realities will exacerbate the economic differences and disparities that we see in many settings across the country, and increasing those differences will cause us to become a nation at war with itself in some key areas and key ways.

We should decide as a nation not to allow that negative and damaging future to happen.

We need to help all children from all groups now in the first weeks, first months, and first years of their lives to avoid having that future define us as a nation.

If we do not help all of our children in that period of their lives, the grim reality will be that we will have a negative future as a nation at multiple levels because we will have significantly growing numbers of children at who are at the low end of the learning gaps in our schools and it is inevitable that those levels of learning difficulty and even learning impairment will handicap and damage large numbers of people for their entire lives.

Very real people are being damaged in very real ways — and the problem is getting worse.

The learning gaps in reading and doing computations in our schools have actually gotten worse for us as a country over the past three decades, and those gaps are at extremely dangerous and damaging levels today.

We are now in the position in many communities where fewer than 30 percent of the students can perform at the levels that are needed for them to do well in major areas of their lives, and we have a growing number of schools and communities where those numbers of students who can perform at basic and appropriate levels are under 15 percent.

There is no possible way for us to afford significant future damage in those communities that only have 15 percent of the students performing at those basic levels.

We need to stop pretending that those issues do not exist today.

That is a very serious set of problems — and we need to stop ignoring it as a society and as a nation.

We need to be very honest with ourselves.

The children who are significantly behind in those key learning areas at that point in their lives will have difficulty succeeding in far too many areas of their lives. Many of those children, as adults, will have and will express significant inter group anger because of the obstacles they face in their lives.

Having a majority of our students on a path to significant inter group conflict and to very real and dangerous inter group anger is not a good thing if we want a future where all of our grandchildren will prosper and where all of our grandchildren will be safe and thrive.

We are not doomed to have that future become our reality.

We have choices and we have opportunities.

That future of inter group conflict and large-scale learning deficiencies for millions of children does not need to happen.

We actually know what to do to keep that from happening and to actually give us a very positive, safe, and successful future as communities and as a country.

We can help every child.

We can give every child from every group the right support and the right interactions in the first weeks, months, and years of life to do well in school and we can eliminate those inter group disparities in our schools and that will significantly help reduce those damaging disparities in other areas of our lives.

We actually finally do know what to do to make those gaps disappear. We have become a lot smarter about those issues and processes over the last few years.

We do not have to guess about how to deal with those sets of issues for all of those children. We now have a science-based answer for that set of problems. Extremely useful and powerful biological and medical science about the first months and first years of life for each child now tells us what we need to do to eliminate those gaps and disparities for our children. We know what to do to succeed in those areas, and we can and should apply that knowledge to help every child.

If we do not intervene now in intentional and effective ways to help every child being born to every group in our country get the right support in the first months and first years of life, we will condemn and doom ourselves to be a country with a future of significant functional failure, dysfunctional, damaging and divisive inter group interactions, destructive and sometimes situationally crippling inter group divisions, and far too many levels of deep seated and deeply embedded inter group conflict and anger.

The inter group disparity and conflict issues that we face today are immediate and very real, and they are being exacerbated and perpetuated by the damage we are inflicting on far too many of our children.

We should decide as a nation not to allow that negative and damaging future to happen.

We need to help all children from all groups now in the first weeks, first months, and first years of their lives to avoid having that future define us as a nation.

Very real people are being damaged in very real ways — and the problem is getting worse.

They have gotten worse for us as a country because we now have twice as many children who are being born into the low end of those gaps. We have a shrinking minority of our total students who can now perform at grade levels in our schools. We are in the position in many communities where fewer than 30 percent of the students can perform at the levels that are needed for them to do well in major areas of their lives, and we have a growing number of schools and communities where those numbers of students who can perform at basic and appropriate levels are under 15 percent.

That is a very serious problem — and we need to stop ignoring it as a society and as a nation.

That future of inter group conflict and large-scale learning deficiencies for millions of children does not need to happen.

We know what to do.

We can help every child.

We actually do know what to do. We do not have to guess about how to deal with those sets of issues for all of those children. We now have a science-based answer for that set of problems. Extremely useful and powerful biological and medical science about the first months and first years of life for each child now tells us what we need to do to eliminate those gaps and disparities for our children.

We know what to do to succeed in those areas, and we can and should apply that knowledge to help every child.

The Neuron Connectivity Timeframes Are the Same for Every Child from Every Group and We All Need to Understand That Process and That Timeframe

The science is clear and it can and should be extremely useful for every child.

The biological processes and the timeframes that strengthen brains and that physically connect neurons in the brain for each child are the same for every child from every group.

The neurons connect in the brain of every child in the first weeks, months, and years of life. That basic process starts immediately for every child. It involves direct interactions with adults for each child. Each of the children from every group who has one or more adults directly interacting with them in those very first timeframes build billions and even trillions of neuron connections that will support each child for life.

However, the children from every group who do not have the direct and individual interactions with adults that build those connections in those first weeks, months and years of life simply do not have those billions of neuron connections in their brains. The children who do not have those billions of neuron linkages made in those early days of their lives are on an entirely different life trajectory for learning, education, behavior, and even physical health.

We need to be extremely honest with ourselves about that process and about how we can use it to help every child from every group in America.

One very sad, grim, problematic and extremely important thing about that process that we all need to clearly understand from the new science is that the brains of all children from all groups also change just before age four. Purging starts just before age four. The brains of our children from every group actually go through a purging process to eliminate many of the unused connections in their brain at that point in time.

Building great brain strength and building very high levels of powerful neuron connectivity is easy to do for children from every group in the very first years of life — and it is much more difficult to do for children from every group after age four.

That time frame is why three decades of very well-meaning, well intentioned, and even sometimes well-funded efforts to close the learning gaps in our schools that have all started with the kindergarten years or with the first grade in our schools as the first intentional and first functional and official education support and learning improvement level timeframes for our children have simply failed.

We know from our national data that we have not closed those significant learning gaps in American schools for three decades — and we now know that we have failed because we have tried to close those gaps for children in all of those settings at 15 years for each child — and we actually must close the gaps at 15 months for each child to make them go away.

That is entirely possible to do.

The actual opportunities for building neuron connections by the billions are huge for the children from every group, and building neuron connections makes learning gaps go away for our children.

The brains of children from every group and from every economic status are very open to massive growth and neuron connectivity in the first weeks, months, and years of life.

That direct opportunity reality for each child and for every group of children is not racial or ethnic or even economic. It is purely experiential at an extremely individual and direct and personal level for each child.

All of the reports that seem to show and demonstrate learning differences by group are both misleading and wrong, because the learning ability is created on an individual basis for each child — and it is not a group process or a group measurement at any level.

What we do in those first weeks, first months, and first years for each child sets up the learning reality for each child — and we now know that we can do the right things for children from every group in that time frame to have a positive impact on learning readiness levels for each child.

It is important to understand that it is not a group process.

It could not be more direct or more individual. The learning gaps that are reported now actually measure the average abilities of individuals in each setting and they are not any kind of group performance that relates in any way to the actual or inherent capabilities of any group as a group.

We know, in each setting, that the learning levels that exist at age 15 are a direct and linear extension of the learning readiness levels that existed for those same children when they were four years old. Multiple studies have shown that the children who are learning ready at age four tend to do well in their later school years, and the children who have fallen behind as early as two years in all of those settings tend not to catch up later.

Learning readiness at age four measurements basically reflect the current neuron connectivity process and status for each individual child that was created by the direct and personal interactions each child had in those first years of life before that measure was taken.

That information tells us that we need to make having our children all learning ready by age four a top priority in each community and setting, or we will never be able to close those gaps in our schools.

When we all understand that entire process, and when we all know what neuron connectivity building does for all of our children — then one very clear commitment that we need to make is to help each of the children who are functionally not learning ready at that early age and who fall behind from that point on in their lives as a result of not being ready at age four.

We should not ever give up on any child.

Now that we understand this process and these timeframes better, we need our schools to learn to be even better at providing support and encouragement to all of the children who have fallen behind and who did not get those billions of connected neurons in those early timeframes.

We need to provide the best possible education for every child regardless of their learning status, and we can do that more effectively when we understand and address the specific difficulties that are faced by each of the children who were personally not learning ready by age four or when they actually arrived at school.

We need to reduce that number of students who are not learning ready at age four from the high and damaging levels we see today. Now that we understand what is creating all of those problems in all of our schools, we need to do the right things in each of our settings and in each of our communities to make sure the vast majority of our children actually are learning ready at that key point in time. We should also help the children who have fallen behind to get the best education they can get from that time forward given their own situation and their own levels of ability in those areas.

We clearly should begin today to help every child who is born or who is nearly born to have the best possible start relative to those interactions and those personal neuron connection experiences, so that when they each get to school, they are each ready and able to learn.

We know what to do — and we know how to do it.

As a nation — and as both families and communities — we need to change the way we think about those very first years and we need to put in place plans and approaches and tools to help every child be ready to learn at that key point in time for their lives.

No other approach or strategy — other than having more children who are each learning ready by age four — has any functional chance of closing the massive learning gaps we have in our schools.

Biology rules.

Biology makes every other strategy fail.

The pure and basic biology that creates those neuron connections in that key time frame is universal for all sets of children from every group. Our new biology process awareness and understanding gives us both a great tool now and great wisdom and insight as well about why our prior efforts to close those gaps in all of our schools have failed for three sad, painful, often well intentioned, but clearly internally damaging decades since we have been measuring the gaps.

Wishful thinking, magical thinking, general good intentions and even the most sincere and earnest good will in any setting will sadly will not work at this point in our history to make those gaps disappear.

We need an actual plan to close those gaps.

We need to create a basic plan as communities and as a country to make the right level of learning readiness at age four for all of our children happen, so that we will not have those learning gaps for the older children in our schools a decade from now.

We have no plans as a nation to deal with either that opportunity or that threat today.

That failure to deal with those issues to help every child functionally and directly in those key timeframes for each child dooms millions of children and it puts us on a dangerous path as a nation to be a nation at war with itself in very damaging ways.

Every child who is being born right now is going to have the trajectory of their lives created by what happens in those first months and years — and we need to act now and well to help every child from every group be on the best possible path for their lives.

We need to be very honest with ourselves about the choices we need to make now to help children from every group.

If we do not choose to help every child — and if we do not step forward to help all children from all groups now in those key times in their lives — we will fall away from what should and could have been a glorious and successful future for us as a nation and we will end up as a sad and badly damaged country where our own children and our grandchildren will be deeply divided and where a high percentage of our grandchildren will have a high likelihood of living lives where they will need to protect themselves from each other to survive.

When we have communities where far too many people are unemployable and cannot read, and where we will have far too many people in prison because they have no other source of income other than gangs and crime, then those communities will be dangerous and unsafe settings for everyone.

We need to be honest with ourselves about how serious this problem is becoming.

Both the percentage of children and the actual number of our children who are being born now who will be on the low end of these learning gaps in our schools is growing significantly to actually be a majority of our total births.

Many Communities Are in Trouble Now

That is the reality we need to face.

We have actually tended to pretend as a society, that those numbers do not exist.

An unfortunate but emotionally and psychologically seductive and powerful blend of political correctness, scientific ignorance, collective and individual political cowardice, magical thinking, emotionally guided and reinforced prejudice-linked group thinking, and pure and often very innocent, naïve, wishful and hopeful thinking about those processes has kept us from dealing with those issues in real, open and effective ways in any of our communities, schools, or settings — and many of our communities are in major trouble today because of that failure to look at those issues and to deal with them in the past in those settings.

Ignorance has unfortunately anchored that process and that agenda.

Ignorance has been a major part of the problem because too many key people in each of our communities have actually simply not known or understood the foundational brain science that sets up the context for those gaps for our children in all of those communities and those schools.

Ask the experts in those areas and settings about the direct and linear impact of biological and physical neuron connections in our children on either group economics or on sociological factors in our communities or on overall education development and performance in our schools, and an extremely high percentage of the experts in each of those areas will not have a clue about why you are even asking the question.

When key people in key thought leader functions and areas do not know or understand the current science of developing brains for children, then building solutions and creating functional remediations for actual inter group differences will not happen in those key areas, and increasing and improving early child brain support processes and tools for all children from all groups has not been part of their thought process or their solution set for the economic, social, health, and political disparities and challenges that those experts and thought leaders work on and cite all the time as areas where we can and should create a better future for ourselves as communities and as a nation.

Ignorance on that particular process by key people has been supplemented, enhanced, reinforced and even exacerbated by very real political cowardice for some people in some settings.

Too many people have willfully and intentionally avoided recognizing, noting, citing, mentioning, outlining, or even discussing either the learning gap numbers or the education system related issues and disparities for our children because some key people in those settings have been afraid of the potential political consequences and potential backlash of recognizing and acknowledging either personally or publicly that those significant learning levels gaps by group actually exist.

Some people who should have been addressing those issues have made the political decision to avoid looking at or addressing the real learning gap numbers in too many of those communities — even when those gaps have been reported publicly and even when they are obvious to anyone looking to see what they actually are in any setting.

That political decision by many people to both duck and avoid the issue is understandable and explainable when there has not been a clear understanding on the part of those leaders or the community of why those gaps exist and when there has not been a sense or awareness of what might actually be done in a functional way to prevent them in the future.

The news media has not helped. The news media in multiple settings have written and presented multiple reports about those gaps each year when they are reported by the schools with almost no sense or understanding by any of the key media people about how significant and important those gaps are or what should be done to either fix and prevent them.

So the reality we face is that far too many people across all spectrums of our community who have seen the data about the major learning gaps in all of those schools have either not understood how serious those numbers are or have not understood why they exist or have not had the political courage or practical insight and functional wisdom to either talk about the problems in clear and understandable ways or to actually do any things to deal with those problems in effective ways.

The Institute of Medicine did a wonderful piece more than a decade ago called, From Neurons to Neighborhoods that clearly described the key issues, and our news media, health care infrastructure, political leadership, economists, and other academics have all managed to ignore what it told us and not understand how important these issues are.

A small number of economists — including Nobel Laureate James Heckman at the University of Chicago, Aaron Sojourner at The University of Minnesota, and Katharine B. Stevens at the American Enterprise Institute — have written about these opportunities and issues as well, and their findings have been ignored by their peers to a painful degree.

Many economists write about issues like earning disparities and health care disparities and even incarceration level disparities, and are completely ignorant of the absolutely foundational linkage and relationship that exists between the neurons that connect in the first two years of life for each child and all of those very significant disparities in all of those other areas of their lives.

We need to have everyone relevant to those issues to understand those processes and the impacts that they have on our communities and people.

We need to change our old approach to the learning gap problem, and we need to change our approach now by using basic science to create context for our leaders and academics in all related fields, and by having people from all of those fields to use that information to guide both their thinking and what we do as communities and as a nation.

We need everyone to understand the problem and the process, and we need everyone to use that information to help our children.

We need to start by looking very directly and honestly at the actual learning gap data from communities across our country and we need all of the key people in each setting to recognize that we need to intervene now to help fix and address those problems in each of the settings where they exist.

The numbers are grim. Grim and sad.

Barely 15 percent of the children in many Milwaukee school systems can read at grade level today.

In Baltimore, the percent of students who can read at grade level is only 13 percent.

Detroit also has about 15 percent of the students in many of their schools able to read at grade level, and Cleveland has major problems that have been getting worse for years.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer did a report on the differences in their schools that referenced an important study done by Stanford of school systems across the country.

California has equivalent gap related numbers and learning problems.

Latino children will make up more than half of the births in that state this year. Only 17 percent of the Hispanic children in California schools statewide scored at proficient levels in math and only 26 percent of those California students were proficient in English.

Nearly 80 percent of the African American male students in our California schools did not meet the basic state reading standards.

Multiple other communities and an extremely broad array of school systems around the country have the same kinds of results and gaps and we need to look with courage and integrity at each of those gaps and understand both why they exist in each setting and what can be done in each setting to help them disappear.

Berkeley and Stanford Have Both Looked at Why Those Gaps Exist

Some highly credible academic settings have done some very important research into those learning level gaps and early interaction issues that helps to teach us what causes those gaps to happen early in the lives of our children and what we need to do to make those gaps disappear everywhere.

The University of California at Berkeley did an extensive and important study of learning readiness levels and problems for Hispanic Children in California, called ‘Differing Cognitive Trajectories of Mexican American Toddlers.’

Those researchers at Berkeley showed that the families of Hispanic children in California had great initial interactions with the children. They reported that the Hispanic children were actually ahead of the other children in learning readiness at nine months but then those same children were, on average, significantly behind the rest of the population at 24 months.

The researchers found that the children who were behind at that very early point in their lives stayed behind for the rest of their education process. We now know that “early falling behind” reality for those children at 24 months set up the major learning gaps we see in all of the communities and schools for Hispanic children in California.

There were clearly some basic factors that created different trajectories for the children in that study. That information about some of those factors was important to discover and understand. Reading to children had an impact that needed to be measured and understood. That California research showed that reading or not reading to Hispanic and non-Hispanic children was a major differentiating factor between the families in the study.

The biggest single factor that differentiated the two sets of kids studied by Berkeley in California was that the Hispanic families had a lower level of reading to their children. Nearly 60 percent of the White mothers who were studied read daily to their children but only 18 to 28 percent of the Mexican American families read regularly to their children.

*Table 1 from that Berkeley study is attached to the very end of this discussion.

Stanford University looked at a similar set of issues.

Researchers from Stanford have also looked at early readiness levels for very young children. The Stanford researchers identified that the lower income infants they studied also started even with the other children but they also found that those children were significantly behind the children who had more parental interactions and more direct language interactions before they were two years old.

In an echo of the Berkeley research, the children studied by Stanford who had fallen behind before age two also did not catch up later with the children who were exposed to more “child directed talk” and direct interactions in their settings in those first years and in the other years of their childhood.

Several other California studies and programs have shown similar results. In Sonoma County, a First Five Commission supported study of learning readiness showed that the Hispanic Families who had children’s books in the home and who read to their children had 60 percent of the children learning ready at kindergarten — and the Hispanic Families with no books in the home had only 15 percent of those children learning ready at that same age.

Reading to children at the earliest possible age as part of a direct interaction with trusted adults is strongly supported by the brain science being produced by Harvard and the University of Washington, and UCLA and Columbia, and the other great brain development programs who are trying to figure out how to get the best start for all of our children. Interactions with trusted adults are golden for children, and books create an interaction between adults and children that can build billions of neuron connections for each child and also create a warm and loving interaction that provides other levels of emotional benefit for each child.

That information about the impact of reading is both an opportunity and a problem for us as a country, because we now know that far too many homes in our country do not have a single children’s book — and we know that actual reading happens in high volumes for some children in those key time frames and not at all for too many others in those same months and years.

Reading Has A Massive Impact on Neuron Connections for Children

Ohio State University just did an extremely important study of families that looked at differences in the reading levels and the number of words spoken to children in different homes in the first five years of their lives.

The Ohio researchers offered extremely important context setting information about the levels of neuron connecting activities for children that are happening now in various homes in the earliest years of life by linking the number of books read to each child and the total number of words that each child heard before age five.

The Ohio researchers broke families into five groups: 1) Nonreaders — people who never read books to their children, 2) People who read one to two times a week, 3) People who read three to five times a week, 4) People who read daily, and 5) People who read five or more books a day.

Their information about the number of homes we have that did not read at all to their very young children was sobering — almost staggering. Those very low numbers for reading to some children reinforced earlier information that said that half of the Medicaid homes in America did not have a single book.

The Ohio researchers estimated that about one in four families did not read at all to their children and that another fourth of the families were only read to once or twice a week.

They counted the number of words that each child would hear spoken from both reading and related interactions before age five.

They estimated that the children who were read to every day would hear 296,000 words spoken to them by age five — and they calculated that the children who had no books read at all would only hear 4,662 words spoken to them in those same key five years.

Under five thousand words is a very low number of words to hear — particularly when we now know from the growing body of research at Harvard, Columbia and The University of Washington, UCLA, and several other important and effective programs-- that neuron connections by the billions are either created or not created in the brain of each child by the direct interactions with adults that happen with each child in those first months and years.

That very large number of homes in our country that we now know have only one book or that actually have no books at all explains why we have so many school systems in our country where only 15 percent or 20 percent of the children can read at grade level by age 15 today.

When slightly more than half of the homes have one book or less in the entire country, we can work backwards in each community to assume that the number of students who had heard enough spoken words to become personally learning ready at age four in those settings was a very low number.

When you combine current science about neuron connections being created by direct interactions between parents and children in those timeframes with those very low numbers of spoken words, that explains why both the Berkeley research and the Sonoma First Five research showed that the learning readiness levels at kindergarten for the children in the families without books was only 15 percent, and that the learning readiness levels for the children in the homes with books was as high as 60 percent.

“Make the Right Thing Easy to Do”

We obviously need to teach that basic linkage between interactions with children and the number of neuron connections in their brain that is supported by the reading of books to children to all parents and to all families from all groups and to every community — and we then need to do effective things in all settings to get books to all children.

Getting books to children is a solution process that lends itself to various creative implementation approaches by people in settings everywhere.

The increased levels of reading part of our solution set as a country can be relatively easy to do. Books are cheap and both children and parents love them, so getting books to families and children is obviously both an easy and high opportunity thing for us to do in each setting to have a major and almost immediate positive impact on children.

We do not need to wait 15 years in our communities to see if reading helps children.

We can measure that success in three years or less in most settings.

Changing that behavior actually makes an immediate difference for our schools because it is much easier at every level of teaching for schools when a higher percentage of the 5-year-olds in their kindergartens are functionally ready to learn, and not headed for the paths of both behavioral issues and learning difficulties.

Any public health agenda that makes the right thing easy to do has a much higher chance of success — and getting books to children is clearly a way where we can make that particular right thing both easy to do and fun to do for parents and children.

We should make books easily available in affordable ways to every family, day care, school, and even library in every community to help close the learning gaps in our schools and to also reduce the number of people who will end up in prison.

The Linkage Between Dropping Out and Going to Jail Needs to Be Understood

The linkage between dropping out of high school and going to jail needs to be understood. It is very real and it is significant.

More than 60 percent of the African American males in their 30s who dropped out of high school are in jail today. Eighty percent of those drop outs will be in jail during their life, compared to 10 percent of the high school graduates from that same group.

We incarcerate more people than any other country in the world by a large margin. We incarcerate seven times more people per capita than Canada, and we overwhelming imprison people who have dropped out of school.

Because of the neuron connectivity processes that happen in the first three years of life, we can actually now very sadly predict with a high level of accuracy by age four in far too many communities, which children are going to drop out of school and end up in jail.

We need to reduce the learning gaps and we also need to reduce the number of people who go to prison and we can do both of those goals in very functional and effective ways by making learning readiness by age four for all of our children a top priority in every community.

We Need All of Our Caregivers and Educators to Understand Those Processes and Timeframes

As a key foundational part of that strategy, we now need to very intentionally and directly reach out now to both our caregivers and our education professionals to get that information about those timeframes and those basic biological processes to all of the right people in those fields and professions.

This neuron connection process and time frame for each child is new information for a surprising number of caregivers and for an even larger percentage of educators.

Some of the old medical teachings and the old education policy textbooks, beliefs and teachings that said that education begins at kindergarten were painfully, dangerously, dysfunctionally, and truly damagingly wrong, and we need to have both our educators and our caregivers knowing that new science and data now.

We now know that the first weeks, first months, and first years of life are extremely important for the development of each of our children from every group.

We need every caregiver and every educator and every family to know that very early time is a time when neurons connect by the billions and even by the trillions for children based on the direct and individual interactions each child has in those timeframes, and we need to have our, families, schools, and communities use that information to help every child.

We also very much need people to know about the grim and sad aspects of the four-year window of opportunity that exists for every child as well.

We now clearly need everyone who cares about our children to know that the hugely valuable and extremely useful process of making neuron connections by the billions in the brain of each child slows and diminishes significantly for each child at Age Four.

We obviously can, should and must still help each of our children after age four. We should not ever give up on any child. We should figure out ways of assessing which children have fallen behind and need more help and need more support and we should do the things that can get that help and support to all of those children.

Our top priority as a nation should be to have all of our children learning ready at age four so we will have the smallest number of children in the groups that need that extra and special support.

Our commitment as a nation should now be to help each child born in America with the opportunity to create billions of neurons when that magnificent opportunity to strengthen their brain is most directly relevant to their life, and we should figure out how to do that now for each child.

The Process Could Not Be More Individual for Each Child — It Is Not A Group Process

This process could not be more individual.

It is not based on race or gender or ethnicity or even income levels.

It is not about groups at any level.

That learning readiness neuron connection process actually happens in a very direct, very specific, very personal and very individual way for each child.

We need to use that information to help children, one at a time, when that opportunity exists for each child because it is an entirely individual process.

We now also each have a moral and ethical obligation to teach that information to everyone who has children in America because everyone who knows that neuron connecting information and who has a new child can use it to help their child and to change the life trajectory in positive ways for that child.

Every mother or father or family who knows those timeframes and who knows that new science can use it in various ways to change and affect and improve the life of each child in their family.

And the equally powerful and equally important negative reality is that each and every family who does not know that information cannot use any of the highly important brain development information that they do not know themselves to give their children better lives and the sad truth and unfortunate reality is that their children will be highly likely to have much more difficult lives as a result of not getting that timely and direct support.

We should make it both a community goal in every community and a national commitment to give the right support in those timeframes to every single American child and we should make it a national priority to teach that science and teach those approaches to every family and community in America.

We need to make sure that every child from every group gets the right support in those essential and key timeframes in order to keep us from going down paths as a nation to greater division and to major individual life difficulties and disparities because of the learning gaps we have and because of the damage those gaps do to too many people.

We should all be very honest with ourselves and with each other that the consequences of having too many children fall significantly behind and both individually and collectively suffer the impact of being behind in key areas will be devastating to our communities and to our nation.

The issue of having major and damaging gaps in learning between our children has major relevance to our survival and to our internal Peace as a nation., We all need to understand that the damage that will be done to us all if we do not solve this problem now will be huge and potentially irreparable to us as a nation. We need both the courage and the wisdom to understand what those risks are to us as a nation if we do not address this issue now.

We Are Increasingly A Nation at War with Itself

We are increasingly a nation at war with itself. We need to be honest with ourselves about the situation we are in. Inter group anger exists in multiple settings. Anger levels in this country are growing and that anger is having an increasing impact on our communities and groups.

We need to be very honest with ourselves and we need to be very open and collectively aware of the situation we are now in relative to basic, powerful and often negative patterns of instinctive inter group behavior so that we can deal with our inter group anger in each of our settings in effective and intentional ways.

We are tribalizing in extremely dangerous ways as a country. That kind of tribalization triggers very powerful and damaging sets of instincts and thought processes that can guide us in very seductive ways to damaging behaviors, emotions, values, and beliefs.

Instincts have great power over our thoughts and emotions.

We far too often actually change our ethical standards and then change our ethical approaches in damaging and dangerous ways when that set of instinct activation happens.

When the instinctive thoughts and the instinctive behaviors that very consistently accompany tribalization in any setting in the world guide our thinking, we can far too easily have a suspension of ethics. We also can actually suspend morality and we often do not act in humane ways in several important areas of our lives when those instincts are shaping our thoughts and emotions.

When those tribal instincts to divide the world into Us and Them are activated, we have people angry with other people who want to damage the people they perceive to be an enemy Them with no sense of guilt or remorse in the context of those instinctive emotions, thought processes and beliefs.

Instinctive thoughts and behaviors can be extremely dangerous.

When we divide the world into Us and Them and when we collectively activate the instincts that support that thinking, we tend to distrust, hate, fear, and want to defeat and damage whoever we perceive to be them.

We are seeing groups of people in our country now who are clearly feeling those kinds of inter group tensions and inter group divisions. Both thought processes and emotions are being triggered by that set of instinctive interactions.

Those instinctive emotions and behaviors feel very right to each of Us when they are activated — and that feeling of being right is what gives them much of their power.

We know those sets of instincts well as a country.

Acting along instinctive inter group lines is not a new set of behaviors for us as a nation.

Those same instinctive inter group behaviors and thought processes have shaped major portions of our history as a country and they very clearly and obviously currently shape major sections of the world we live in today. We need to look at those settings and at our own history to see what that look tells us about the risks we face here now.

There are more than 125 ethnic conflicts going on in the world today, where people are killing people from the other groups they hate.

We Need to Understand What All of Those Conflicts Tell Us About Our Own Future Inter Group Interactions

We need to both see and understand those conflicts in all of those settings — because they are very real and because they are clearly very current modern human behaviors. We need to understand and fear the reality that similar tribal behaviors and instincts can far too easily be triggered here and that set of very seductive instincts can far too easily steer us as groups into similarly destructive thoughts and behaviors.

Myanmar, Syria, Burma, and multiple other multi group countries are showing us in real time today how dangerous those inter group tribal instincts are. The patterns in all of those settings are universal, clear, sadly consistent, highly predictable and entirely instinctive at their core.

The Rohingya are being expelled and massacred from land they have occupied as a people since the 15th century as a permanent local minority. The people killing and expelling them feel no guilt because the people hurting them have been morally dehumanized in the intellectual construct of those sets of inter group instinctive thoughts and instinct structured values and belief systems.

South Sudan has some horrible examples of comparable purely ethnic cleansing going on with deep instinctive impact that have people being both killed in large numbers, raped and abused, and driven from their homes by local majority tribes in each setting.

The Yazidis of Syria have been subjected to genocidal pressures — and the Alawites, Kurds, Christians, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslim tribes are all killing each other in that country today in purely instinctive inter group activities.

The Kurds are facing some of the worst levels of instinctive inter group values and inter group behaviors in multiple countries.

Kenya and The Central African Republic both have groups killing each other as groups.

The same sets of inter group instincts are in place and shaping how people think and act in each of those settings.

There are more than 125 of those kinds of conflicts going on in various settings today. Modern times have obviously not civilized us. Modern realities, technologies and science have made some changes in the level and kinds of weaponry that we use now to damage other people in some conflicted settings, but the core behaviors, values, and emotions that shape what people do in each inter group setting have not changed since our human history began.

In each setting, people in each of the groups define themselves to be Us — and they then define the other groups in their setting at the most basic level to be Them. Groups of people do horrible things to other people perceived to be Them in all of those openly conflicted settings with clear negative intentions toward whoever they feel right damaging as the result of those very powerful and clearly activated instincts guiding their emotions, values, beliefs, and behaviors.

Those examples of instinct guided and highly conflicted and dangerous inter group behavior are included in this specific discussion about the clear and direct need we have to provide early childhood support for all of the children from all of the groups in our country because the truth is that those inter group instincts and those instinct guided behaviors are very relevant to us here as a nation.

We are feeling those primal potential instinctive differentiations between groups as a possible divisive and damaging future for us — and the truth also is that we need to do positive things now for each other to keep those sets of seductive and powerful instincts from steering us into doing evil things to each other at a collective level, here.

We can use our instincts to make us a great, safe, and enlightened country rather than just another multitribal setting at war with itself. We can steer ourselves to a wonderful future — and that steerage needs to start by having us agree that we all want each other to be part of that wonderful future.

We need proof points now for our collective good will.

Helping all of our children from every group get the right set of supports on neuron connectivity in those first months and years of life can be very clear and important proof points for our future — because we all love our children and helping every child can be a key part of that set of positive things and creating that very intentional and explicit help in effective ways for all of our children can prove to us all that we actually do want us all to do well as a people and as a nation.

There is no better proof of good intent than helping each of our children.

We Clearly Have Had Our Own History Shaped by Those Instincts

It would be foolish to deny that those instinct shaped inter group behaviors are very relevant to us as a nation or a people.

We have clearly have not been immune from the impact of those fundamental and too often entirely negative inter group us-them instincts in our own country. We need to look clearly at our own history of inter group interactions and we need to see it clearly for both what it is and for what it has been.

Those sets of instincts have shaped major elements of our history.

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding books and website were written to both help us understand more clearly who we have been, and to help us build on the best features of who we can and should be going forward.

We need to look directly and clearly at the most negative aspects of our own national history and we need to become very honest with ourselves about those worst behaviors. We also need to appreciate and understand the significant and the very positive opportunities that we have now as a nation and as a people to give our children and grandchildren a future of safety, success, and inter group Peace.

We Also Have Done Some Things Very Well and That Creates Opportunity Now

We have done many things wrong — but we have also done many things right and we need to build now very intentionally on that most positive part of our historical foundation.

There are many wonderful things about our country that we need to protect, preserve, and perpetuate, and we need to do that in very intentional ways with a full and enlightened understanding of what we are doing.

There are key elements of the American Dream that are wonderful. We need to extend that Dream in its fullest and most positive form and most enlightened form to every American.

We have had a wonderful steam of enlightened thinking in this country about basic democratic principles and about universal rights for humanity, and we have made slow but very directionally correct and positive progress toward being a nation with equal rights for all of our people — regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender.

We are still relatively unique in the world in some of those areas of inter group acceptance and support. Increased diversity and expanded inclusion between groups of people is not a goal of governments in very many other settings in the world.

We Americans have been slowly but consistently becoming more enlightened in our beliefs and behaviors, but we see more than a hundred other settings in the world where the worst kinds of very basic and obvious inter group instincts are creating conflict, anger, and ugly and damaging behaviors.

Those patterns are pretty predictable in any inter group setting when we see them triggered.

History both repeats itself and rhymes. That is true because those patterns exist in us all and because they play out with great consistency in every conflicted inter group setting.

Our inter group instincts are shaped by our territorial, hierarchical, culture building and acquisitional sets of instincts in most settings, and we need to understand the entire package of instincts in order to both know what we have done and to shape a better future based on creating true and functional inter group Peace.

We see problematic behaviors that are led by people with their own group and personal alpha instincts activated in a very wide range of settings who intentionally and often very skillfully and effectively trigger and exacerbate various kinds of inter group conflicts to enhance and increase their own alpha status and power.

The InterGroup books were written to help understand and address those problems and opportunities.

InterGroup Instinct Guided Leaders Can Sometimes Very Intentionally Trigger Divisive Tribal Thinking and Behaviors

All of those instinct related forces and factors that deal with Inter Group issues have the potential to put us at risk today in America.

Us-Them thinking has shaped who we are and what we do in a number of ways for a very long time.

We have been a nation where the primary and most powerful Us group since the late 1600s has been the blended White tribe that is actually an amalgamation of all of the legacy European immigrants. Those particular highly tribal European groups fought each other for centuries with clear intent and strong inter group identity and inter group clarity in Europe — but their descendants intermarried freely here and then created a new White Us core group for our country.

That merged White group became the clear functional majority of our population. That group activated all of the basic and universal patterns of Us-Them instincts — and it defined their Us as being White and it defined each other group in America who was not White as being Them in the context of those basic instincts and interactions.

The key point to understand is that being White defined our primary Us group as a nation at both an instinctive level and a highly functional level for more than 300 years.

A major stream of behaviors that defined much of our history as a country was that the White group felt and perceived its own very clear Us-Them instinctive delineations against each of the other groups in the country that did not look White, and passed laws for years that reflected those beliefs.

Our instincts cause us all to look for people who look like us and who sound like us as a first indicator of who, in any setting, might actually be us — and that basic delineation tool created and shaped our history for a couple of centuries without us even suspecting that our instincts were shaping our thoughts, emotions, values and beliefs at a very powerful level for all of those issues and functions.

The InterGroup books on instinctive behavior explain that history and process-- and also explain how our core set of values has changed in some important and often enlightened ways over time that give us an opportunity now to rise to another level as a country at this point in our history.

What we need to understand and recognize now is that “White” Americans have filled a major Us role by being the majority of the population of this country for more than three hundred years, and that group continues to be the majority of our population today.

The Majority of Births This Year Will Be to Minority Americans

However —

We need to understand very clearly what is happening to Us as a nation right now on those issues and factors.

We need to understand the new developments in the context of our instinctive behaviors.

We can never be free of instinctive behavior. No one can ever be instinct free.

Each of us has basic sets of instincts that shape us as maternal, territorial, hierarchical, inclusive and exclusive tribal and cultural alignments, in very influential, powerful, and usually invisible ways.

Building cultures is an instinctive behavior.

We build cultures for every group and the job of every culture is to help each group achieve its instinctive goals. The Primal Pathways book explains how that process works.

We all feel instinctive loyalty to our culture and to our group — and that set of instincts can be used to help us do enlightened and positive things — and it can also lead us far too easily to behavior that can be, in its worst manifestations, literally evil.

We need to understand that full set and package of influences — and we need our intellect to use that package of instinctive behaviors in very intentional and enlightened ways to help us have a wonderful future as a nation and a people.

To do that, we need to be very clear about the fact that the long-standing majority status and role for our White American group is now changing.

The numbers are not debatable.

We just reached the point in our history where the actual numerical majority of births in America this year will be, for the first time ever, from our various minority populations.

White Americans are no longer the majority of births in America.

There are several minority groups that now have, in total, a majority of births — and our Hispanic births will be the single largest component of all new infants born in America this year.

That is a permanent change.

There is no possible scenario that will have the White subset of our population be the permanent majority of births in this country into our nation’s distant future.

The prior historical ability of the legacy White tribe to maintain easy and basic control as a group over the direction of the country based purely on relative population size is clearly changing and it is changing very rapidly.

That change now creates a major opportunity for us that we need to address, if we want to continue to succeed as a country, and if we want all of our groups to have successful futures.

It is absolutely clear that we will need as a nation to come up with an more inclusive set of governing approaches that includes all groups of Americans if we want to continue to be the most successful country on the planet and if we functionally want to have all of our people prosper and thrive.

We need to build a new American Us — and we need to create the new Us based on our shared values and our shared beliefs and not on our shared race or our shared ethnicity.

We need to be an Us based on the beliefs we commit to and share.

We can do that and we can actually have everyone win when we all help each other win.

We can easily continue to be the best, most successful, safest, and most powerful nation on the planet if we understand exactly what we are doing and if we do the right things now to make that happen.

We need to make our diversity into a huge asset. We need to take advantage of the great synergy that results from an aligned and reinforcing set of inputs and support from all of the groups who are part of our nation — and that synergy can make us both extremely interesting and collectively great.

The books Peace In Our Time and The Art Of InterGroup Peace both have advice, coaching, and counsel on how to make that future happen.

We need to start by each of us deciding, understanding and believing that we all will be much happier when we all know and believe that our children and grandchildren will be both successful and safe for the lives they will lead if we do key things now to make that future happen.

We Need A Strategy of Win-Win for All Groups Instead of Win-Lose or Lose-Lose

We need a strategy of Win-Win as a country instead of either Win-Lose or Lose-Lose as a nation and as a people.

The risk and danger of us going to war with ourselves are both very real if we do not give people from all groups the very believable sense and belief that we collectively actually do want us all to Win.

We also need the people from our groups who are being drawn into tribal thinking and divisive behavior today to be able to set aside that highly seductive tribal conflict approach in favor of becoming an American Us.

We need to very intentionally and knowingly do the right things now that will create inter group Peace for our future.

Our future begins now.

Therefore —

We need to commit to inter group Peace now and we need to do the right things now to make inter group Peace happen and thrive.

We are blessed with a great set of both functional and enlightened values that we can use to anchor that process.

We need inter group Peace now that is based on our shared beliefs and our shared values, rather than on our specific ethnicities or our separate races. We need to appreciate and even enjoy and celebrate the fact that our separate ethnicities and races can make us safer and both more interesting and more successful when we share commitments and when we do want each other to win.

We can do that internally aligning work, and we can become a nation that is stronger and safer based on our shared beliefs, because we do have a wonderful set of core values that can give our grandchildren a wonderful and successful world.

Our core values are enlightened and powerful and magnificent in their acceptance and blending of our best beliefs.

We will all need to work in aligned and very intentional inter group and inter individual ways to make obvious, intentional and clear success as a values-driven Us happen.

The InterGroup books have chapters that outline the values we have been using as a nation to give us our best context for who we are. We need to make those values clear and explicit to unite us and guide us — and we need to show each other our good intentions relative to having a win-win future for every group and then doing things collectively to make that win-win future happen.

We clearly need to do things together to both prove our collective good will and to help every group prosper.

We Need to Help Every Child to Prove That We Want Us All to Win

Our children are the single most important component of that approach and strategy.

We need to help every child.

This piece about brain development in our children in the first years of life actually started with that premise as a foundation for inter group Peace in America.

We know that we have massive learning gaps in our schools. We have major school systems where barely 20 of the students can read at grade level — and we have settings where large numbers of children cannot read at all.

We need to have people not to blame the schools or teachers for those failures and we need everyone in our communities to understand the basic fact that the work to close those learning gaps in kindergarten and in our high schools has failed for 30 years because the actual neuron connections in the brain that close those learning gaps need to be made at 5 months for each child and they cannot be made in the brain of any child when the children are 15 years old.

We Need to Build Neurons for Peace

Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, the University of Washington, and a number of other great academic programs have all now shown us the massive impact of those first years and even months of life on our children’s brains — and we need to use that exploding body of extremely useful science to help every child with the right support in those key times.

Dr. Beatrice Beebe and her team at Columbia University have shown that the first 100 days of life are extremely important. This is highly useful science about the first weeks and months of life. They have shown that you can analyze the status of a child at 100 days old and you can predict with extreme accuracy which children will be facing learning challenges at three years old and five years old.

The Columbia team also showed that you can intervene and save just about every child who is behind in those ways at that point in time.

Epigenetic forces affect every child very early in each life in ways that we did not expect or understand until new research began to uncover the purely epigenetic impact that happens for our children in those time frames.

So we now have a much higher level of understanding of the lifelong impact on each child of the interactions each child has in those time frames and we now know that we need to use that new knowledge to change the learning gaps in our schools.

We need to change the learning readiness level of children before age four in order to succeed in eliminating those gaps — and that means that we need to develop both a national commitment and a national strategy to achieve those goals.

We Need to Make Learning Readiness for Every Child at Age Four A National Priority

We need to make learning readiness levels for every child at age four a major national priority and we need to make improving age four learning readiness levels for all children a priority for every community in our country and we need to do that all in clear and evident good faith in very visible and credible ways as proof to each other of our collective commitment to have every group of Americans do well and succeed.

We have a great opportunity to help every child because for the first time ever, more than half of the births in America this year will be covered by Medicaid.

We are blessed with having a set of tools we can use to help achieve those goals that we can simply decide to use as a basic strategy and overarching plan for the country. We do not need to invent links to the births of America. We have direct links now that we can repurpose with relative ease to help build neuron links in our children.

Our Medicaid program gives us a very direct link with the highest impact mothers today.

We learned a couple of years ago, that the vast majority of Medicaid mothers did not know they could strengthen the brain of their child with exercise in the first months and years of life, and we learned that most mothers in our country did not know that neuron connections happened by the billions in their child when they talked directly to their child and when they read to their child.

Every mother in America deserves to know that information, and we can now make the national decision to have Medicaid teach it to every mother, beginning with the obstetricians who care for the mother before and during the birth. Obstetricians are highly credible with their patients — and the time just before birth is a perfect time to explain to the mother to be that reading to a child and talking to a child immediately builds neuron connections that last for life.

We also need our Medicaid Pediatricians and Medicaid family doctors and Medicaid nurses and other caregivers to teach that information to every new mother and family.

Medicaid needs to insist that every member of the care team is teaching that information to families and supporting that process for every child.

Most Medicaid mothers currently interact with the WIC program for food and nourishment issues and support.

We very much need the WIC programs that teach most Medicaid mothers about nutrition and that hand out food to mothers now to also teach brain strengthening and to hand out books at WIC visits for the children.

Books are transformational. Books are also cheap — and we should get ample books to every child.

The Medicaid program has multiple effective tools. We have nurse family partnership programs that do great work today and spend relatively little money doing it. That partnership team can be enlarged to help more mothers in those first months and years. We now also very much need those nurses to be sure to include brain development in their coaching processes.

Early Head Start — that begins often at birth — can also help us achieve that learning readiness by four goal for many children, and it can be expanded relatively easily in many settings.

We can achieve the goal of helping every child. We actually have both opportunity through Medicaid and through other currently available tools that are in existence today to help every family and child.

We have not used those tools in intentional ways to create learning readiness for our children — and we need to change that behavior and we need to use those tools in explicit and intentional ways immediately to help every child from every group get the needed start to be ready to learn when they get to school.

The highest impact and single most effective thing that we can do to keep Americans out of prison is to help in those first high leverage weeks to interact with each child to keep them from dropping out of school.

That pattern of not being able to read and ending up in jail has been recorded in several other countries. That incarceration situation that relates to learning readiness levels at age four for each child is not unique to our country. Other countries have similar patterns and they have those patterns for similar reasons.

More than 60 percent of the prisoners in English jails also cannot read.

Canada imprisons far fewer people than we do, but 73 percent of the prisoners in Canada are high school drop outs there

Scotland imprisons far fewer people than we do, but studies have shown that 80 percent of the people in Scottish prisons can’t read.

Those patterns make sense in all of those countries and in our own — because people who drop out of school and who cannot read tend to find crime a possible source of resources in every setting — without the prison outcome necessarily having a link to race or ethnicity in those settings.

The single most effective thing we can do to reduce the number of people from every group in America who go to prison is to have neuron connectivity succeed for all of the children who are born in America before they are four years old.

We have a number of other things we need to do to give us future of inter group Peace in America.

We Need to Make the American Dream Real for Everyone

We need to do things to eliminate disparities in health care.

We need community policing approaches that work with every group.

We need to decide to commit to our shared values in a way that gives us all Peace of Mind that we are, in fact, an America brought together by our beliefs and not by other alignments.

We need to want people from all groups to prosper and we want win-win results for every group. To make that possible, we need all children to have the same opportunities to connect the neurons in their brains in the first months and years of life, so that the economic opportunities that exist as we move toward more inclusion in the work force can be realized by more people.

We Should Create A Peace Movement — and We Should Start with Honestly Helping All of Our Children

At a core and foundational level — grounding and anchoring our interactions — we need to make a collective commitment to help every single one of our kids, and we should collectively create a Peace movement that includes all groups.

We are a very wealthy and capable country. We can help every child and we can begin to do it immediately.

We have enough money to give the right start to every kid and we have the tools that can be easily linked to our Medicaid programs to make that happen if we ask every Medicaid program in every state to make learning readiness by age four a program priority.

We need every school system in America to make learning readiness by age four a top priority. Please. Help with that process. Give this piece to every school board member you know and ask them for their personal and direct support. Teach it to as many educators as you can as quickly as you can. Schools are very tired and many school systems and their teams are disheartened based on their decades of failure in closing those gaps in their schools, and they really need this information to deal with these issues going forward.

Share it with every school leader you know.

Our economy will thrive and our children will succeed in needed ways when we make that commitment.

We can make the American Dream work for everyone — and our grandchildren will live in Peace, safety, and prosperity if we achieve that goal.

The choice we make to help every child now to make that happen should not be hard. Harvard did a very clear and direct video on that exact point that deserves looking at. It is the next link.

Let’s help every child and let’s start now.

Share the information you have learned about the impact of neuron connectivity with one family to help one child. It all happens one child at a time.

You can personally change a life in a very powerful and positive way by teaching that process in a way that someone uses it to help one child.

Figure out how to do it and then make it happen.

Share this simple website for families with anyone who does not understand what you are proposing. Fairly simple information — directly accessible for parents and families — with roles for grandparents as well as both mothers and fathers.

Share this information as well with every faith leader that you know from every faith setting. Religious leaders love helping their children, and this information is a huge gift to every group. The Catholic Conference in California wrote a policy piece on that opportunity that you might find useful to share with other faith leaders.

We need to decide that we want a future of inter group Peace for America — and we should anchor that Peace by having all groups do well and by helping every child in America get the right start on building neuron connections by the billions and trillions in those first days, weeks, months, and years of life when those processes happen for each child.

Never let a great opportunity go to waste.

Peace.

Our children and grandchildren will think much more highly of us in twenty and thirty years if we do the right things now to allow them to live in Peace and not become just another country awash in inter group anger, conflict, and fear.

We get to choose the path we will go down for both inter group interactions and neuron strength in our children.

We need to choose now for both agendas.

Let’s choose well, and let’s build trillions of neuron connections in millions of brains because it is actually possible to do and because it needs to be done as soon as we can do it for both our children and our nation.

Peace. In our Time.

*Differing Cognitive Trajectories of Mexican American Toddlers — Table 1