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Since Head Start began in 1965, researchers, practitioners and policy staff have been debating it's merits - or shortcomings - in a variety of studies and reports. The latest report, the Third Grade Follow Up to the Head Start Impact Study reports that gains fade after third grade. This is a narrow and misunderstood view of the huge benefits that Head Start children and families experience. Many articles and pieces have been written to address the 'findings'.

 

Oral health for young children gets a lot of attention these days and several programs in Arizona are working together to get this message out to families and community members. Head Start provides an easy way to get up-to-date information and resources on this subject.

Click here for the latest newsletter issue from the Head Start National Center on Health and click here to subscribe so the newsletter comes right to your inbox. You don't need to be employed with Head Start to do this. The information is applicable for all programs that work with young children and their families!

Most of us reading this newsletter work with young children and their families in some capacity. Some of us work directly with children and families, others of us work on their behalf. Whether we realize it or not, if we work with the youngest of children, we work with their families as well. The families that we work with may look very much like our own...or very different...or somewhere in the middle. Families have changed a lot in the last few decades. In my own family, we have step-parents, step-children, divorce of spouse, death of spouse, children who are adopted and the traditional 'biological' affiliation.

This article in "Child Care Exchange" offers a look at this subject of families: Today's Families: Who Are We and Why Does It Matter? I'm sure you will find it interesting and helpful to your work.  

 

A working paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child explains why significant deprivation is so harmful in the earliest years of life and why effective interventions like home visiting are likely to pay significant dividends in better long-term outcomes in learning, health and parenting of the next generation. The entire article, The Science of Neglect: The Persistent Absence of Responsive Care Disrupts the Developing Brain, can be downloaded from the site.

In the article, Overcoming Impact of Adversity on Learning, authors describe how Washington state has transformed the way its agencies work together and in partnership with researchers to address the effects of early adversity on learning and to help disadvantaged children build resiliency and other so-called executive-function skills they need to learn and grow. In the process, officials hope to create a national model for rapidly translating new research in fields like cognitive and neuroscience into usable practice.

Executive function skills help us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time and revise plans as necessary. A new evidence base has identified these skills as being essential for school achievement, success in work, and healthy lives. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University has published a new two-page summary, InBrief: Executive Function: Essential Skills for Life and Learning (2012), outlining how these skills develop, what can disrupt their development, and how supporting them pays off in school and life.

See also, the Center's related 5-minute video, Executive Function: Skills for Life and Learning (2012), as well as a new online training module to help early care and education providers better understand and support the development of executive function skills, produced by the Washington State Department of Early Learning, in collaboration with the Center's Frontiers of Innovation initiative.

Child Care Aware offers this resource paper on Executive Function and School Readiness, much like our theme of last years Mental Health Symposium. Executive Function is something that early childhood educators are hearing more and more about. In this article, discussion focuses on how getting ready to start school is about more than just learning the ABCs. Educators and other experts say that in order to be successful in school, young children need to develop skills in executive functions.

It's long been known that early childhood experiences can have a profound affect on later opportunities and life chances. Now, a collection of new studies suggests that those experiences may actually affect the size and workings of the brain. This article, Childhood environment affects brain growth and function, new studies find, discusses several interesting studies. Some of the findings cite 1) One study showed a correlation between parental educational and economic status and later brain capacity in certain regions involved in memory and cognitive control; 2) Another study found that children exposed to abuse at a young age as adults exhibited "enhanced stress response"; and 3) A third study found that adults who grew up in poverty showed more memory deficit than others from different economic backgrounds.

The 'good news' part of the article showed that the team also found that a) if parents and children from lower-income families participated in an eight-week training session, their memory development improved significantly; and b) relatively minor differences in the home environments of young children might affect their later brain development.