Finding the Middle, Early

I read an interesting Huffington Post Blog today about the need for early childhood to be a major world-wide focus in order to ensure positive global development in the future.

Find the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-grindal/the-next-stage-of-global-_b_3978868.html

The article points out that in the last 20 years, there have been major increases in children attending primary schools across the world. However, there has been less progress with enrolling children in “proven early childhood development programs” worldwide.

The authors then go on to discuss the importance of a strong early childhood to build a foundation for later healthy growth and development, and the links to a successful global workforce and economy. They outline the importance of healthcare, parental support, and basic nutrition as being major factors early in life that can substantially impact later academic, behavioral, and global economic success.

All of this is fairly straightforward to me. It’s the party line I’ve heard (and have generally subscribed to) from day one of my studies in child development.

However, something of this post smacked a little too much of the idea that there is only “one right way” to do something for my taste.

Though I certainly understand the benefits and values of early childhood supports and education, and fully support the need to expand resources for families who are at-risk for highly preventable mental and physical health conditions, the idea that “proven early childhood development programs” are the one, and perhaps only way to go makes me a little leery.

 

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Especially when we’re taking a world-wide focus on the issue, focusing in on early childhood programs, which in many places are nationally funded and/or monitored, seems a little short-sited. Though I fully understand the importance of evidence-base in developing programs and interventions, I also know that science is one, but not the only, way of knowing something is good for kids.

Don’t get me wrong; it drives me nuts when people assume that they know everything that I know about child development just because they have kids. But it also drives me nuts when scientists claim to know everything about children when they’ve never worked directly with them outside of a laboratory setting one day in their lives.

There are generalizable realities in the human condition, to be sure. And science can help elucidate some of that generalizability.

But it is not, nor should it be, the end all and be all, largely because the field of child development has not studied everything in and across every world culture. There are nuances, differences, and beautiful variations in the way in which humans approach and experience the world around them. Science has a tendency to trounce on that beauty and chalk it up to “variations” or “outliers” that either aren’t important enough to explore, or are just noise in an otherwise coherent data set.  

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This just in: Science doesn’t know it all.

And that’s okay. Frankly, it’d be a pretty boring world if we did know it all. Plus, all the scientists out there would have to pack their bags and go home if there was nothing else to learn.

My point here is that though science has incredible value and can shed light on some of the most complex things in our world, it is not the only answer.

“Evidence-based” isn’t, and shouldn’t be the only way.

There are a lot of ways to do things right. There are a lot of ways to know the right thing to do. There are a lot of ways to get to the same positive outcome. ‘Because science says so’ is one of many valid reasons to do something.

I’d just hate to think that we’re getting to a place where nations institute a 'one and only right way' to raise children, based solely on what science tells us. That mindset is limiting, and squashes the beautiful variations inherent in the human race.

Now, I don’t mean to be an alarmist. Nor do I mean to suggest that the authors of this article don’t recognize the value in other ways of knowing, or the variation in culture that may be lost in a more one-size-fits-all approach.

But I worry that there are people who may read this article, and who may subscribe fully to the belief that universal, evidence-based early childhood education is the only way to “correctly” raise children. And the more early childhood education gets entangled with state and federal policy and funding, the more this belief will become intractably instilled in our collective psyche.

But instead, let’s call this what it is. Early childhood education programs are a very western idea of child-rearing. And that's okay. But that doesn't make it suitable for the whole world. 

So I fear we are again getting into a situation where the West thinks it knows the “right way” to raise children, to the detriment of other less powerful, but equally vibrant cultures throughout the world that might raise their children differently.  

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It’s a hard line to walk because on the one hand, there are certainly universal things that are very detrimental to the successful development of a child. Poor health and nutrition, traumatic experience, lack of family support and connection, mental illness, violence, the list goes on. And there are things that early childhood supports can do to help buffer against those negative early life experiences and enhance the lives of young children. Some of those supports are early interventions and quality early childhood care. Raising global awareness of these things is a laudable goal. 

But on the other hand, where do we stop? Quality is important, to be sure, but if certain cultural beliefs and practices are not in the “evidence-based curriculum” does the funding stop? Where does the western world draw the line on what’s an acceptable way to spend taxpayer dollars? What does it deem as “okay”? What’s defined as “not good enough”? Who decides?

These are the questions I fear we haven’t discussed enough.

And I worry that it will be the loud, powerful voices of western thinking demolishing all others in their path without careful consideration of what might be lost in the process.

And that sounds eerily familiar, and feels a little like groundhog day.

What do you think? Are we just repeating history all over again? Or will we find a middle ground, early?

Why the brain is not enough

Recently a colleague passed along a really interesting article about prevention, neuroscience, and mental illness. (Find it here: http://chronicle.umbmentoring.org/prevention-neurobiology-and-childrens-mental-health/).

This article highlights some really interesting considerations when it comes to the role of brain science in treating mental illness. Particularly, given the recent federal granting efforts around the Brain Initiative, it’s interesting to think about the value placed on brain sciences, and how that has come to eclipse many other forms of knowledge.

The article’s author quotes a recent article from the NewYork Times by Benjamin Fong, who writes about how psychology has come to fully embrace cognitive neuroscience, and the potential pitfalls of such complacent bedfellows. He highlights many of the arguments surrounding the pros and cons of the Brain Initiative, and astutely reflects:

“The real trouble with the Brain Initiative is not philosophical but practical. In short, the instrumental approach to the treatment of physiological and psychological diseases tends to be at odds with the traditional ways in which human beings have addressed their problems: that is, by talking and working with one another to the end of greater personal self-realization and social harmony.” (see full article here)

This got me thinking.

Isn’t it weird that we’ve gotten to a point in history where “fixing the brain” is perceived as the easiest way to treat mental illness?

It wasn’t always this way. Historically, and even as recently as 20-30 years ago, the brain was viewed as an enigma, a black box that could not be understood. And it was early neuroscientists who, to their credit, started pushing the limits of what we knew about the brain and advanced the field by leaps and bounds to the point where we as a society have come to place high value on understanding the role of the brain in our lives – arguably to a fault.

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Historically, humans used to rely on each other or home remedies to treat mental and physical illnesses. Trusted home-remedies, and medicinal traditions were passed on through generations of humans.

Care was kept within community.

And yes, with scientific discoveries and medical advancements, we found out that a lot of the things we’d been doing were just plain wrong. Some of the traditional methods of treatment were doing more harm than good. Anyone who’s been to a museum display medical history can attest to this.

Scientific progress has brought humanity crucial advancements that have saved lives. There’s no doubt about that. But when applying science to the human psyche, things get a little trickier.

Traditional reductionist methods of scientific inquiry do not fit well when trying to examine human psychology. Our lives, and our understanding of them, are determined not just by our genetic makeup, but by the interactions with our surrounding environments. Those environments have the power to shape the expression of genetics and physical biology.

It’s nature and nurture in a never-ending tango. Each taking the lead from time to time, in somewhat unpredictable ways.

The problem with psychology embracing cognitive neuroscience so fully and completely is that traditional, reductionist perspectives on how the world works don’t fit well for psychology because of its inherent complexity and unpredictability.

 

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Unfortunately, recent scientific priorities have pushed us to favor quick fixes to change the brain, because the brain is easy. It’s an organ. It can be reduced to classic scientific fields of biology and chemistry; scientific fields that are easy (or easier anyway) to understand and manipulate in ways that science can predict.

And this is where Benjamin Fong’s point is well taken. There is a complete lack of practicality of the Brain Initiative for treating psychological problems. Understanding how the brain works is great, but humans, despite being made up of chemicals, are not just chemicals. Humans are social beings who rely on trust and relationships with one another to survive. Without that social structure, relationships, and community, humans cease to thrive. Chemical treatments to fix deep psychological wounds created by the pain of broken communities and shattered relationships just won’t cut it. Those broken communities and shattered relationships will continue to do damage until the factors contributing to that brokenness are addressed.

This brings to mind a book called GhostMap, which is lauded in public health circles as a true triumph of human ingenuity and the scientific method to stop a massive cholera epidemic in London, England. Instead of using a solely medical model approach to find an effective treatment for cholera for everyone who was sick, and then accepting fact that cholera would continue to be an epidemic the whole of London, the emphasis was placed on figuring out WHY cholera was spreading in the first place. What was it that people were doing that was contributing to the spread of illness?

And wouldn’t you know it, it was a lifestyle thing. Choices that humans were making about where to deposit bodily waste where it was too near the local water supply, thus spreading the bacteria that causes cholera.

Because of this discovery, people who were living in community with one another, to promote their own health, changed where they deposited waste, and subsequently stopped the epidemic. Instead of sinking resources and money into treating everyone who had the illness with medicine, one environmental change prevented the spread of the disease, halting the epidemic in its tracks.

They could have treated cholera with medicine alone – treating the illness.

But they wouldn’t have saved as many lives as they did by changing the behaviors and systems that were causing the epidemic in the first place.

Now I’m not saying that some of our most pervasive and complicated societal problems like poverty, violence and racism, are as easily solved as figuring out where to deposit waste. Nor am I saying that all mental illness is attributable to only environmental factors.

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What I’m saying is that the answers to the bigger problems with mental illness do not lie in the human brain alone. That the Brain Initiative, for all of its strengths and laudable endeavors, is not the silver bullet to end mental illness.

Because when it comes down to it, we can treat the symptoms of mental illness by altering brain chemistry all we want, but until we grapple with some of the bigger factors that contribute to mental illness, we’re only putting Band-Aids over the gaping wound.

Fixing the brain is easy.

“Talking and working with one another to the end of greater personal self-realization and social harmony” as Benjamin Fong suggests?

That’s hard, but it’s what needs to be done.

More than ABCs and 123s

So I might be getting a little controversial here.

Okay, maybe a lot controversial.

Hold on to your hats.

I’ve been hearing more and more about things like “kindergarten readiness” and “early childhood education” being taken to a whole new extreme regime of tests, rote memorization, and butt-in-seat learning. And with recent legislation (at least in Minnesota) for a huge increase in early childhood funding, there’s a potential for this type of regime to be taken to an even greater (or rather, worse) extreme.

The stakes are high to prove that early childhood is the silver bullet. Promises have been made about the efficacy of spending money in the early years to increase kindergarten readiness and student achievement across the board.

 

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And many of those promises are based on a lot of good, solid research.

But the problem is, how do you prove the money was successfully invested? You need a measure of kindergarten readiness and of success in school to demonstrate that there has been improvement. That the millions of dollars invested in the state’s youngest citizens have provided measurable benefit to young children and to society.

And the measure of success, for decades, has been standardized testing.

Unfortunately, the main measurements of “school readiness” are not based on measuring the ability to learn effectively, but on concepts, like numerical reasoning (knowledge of numbers) and vocabulary (what words you know).

And what do early childhood educators often think when they hear those words?

Reading and math.

It’s no wonder that the focus is on pounding the ABCs and 123s in the early years. These days, if you don’t know the alphabet inside and out before you enter kindergarten you’re somehow a failure and labeled “not ready for school”.

(As an aside, my mom tells me I didn’t know the alphabet when I showed up to kindergarten….and clearly my life has been a total failure since then…)

 

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But the thing that researchers and other early childhood experts will tell you, is that it’s not about ABCs and 123s. Rather, things like self-regulation (the ability to control your own behaviors), executive function (paying attention, planning, memory), and emotional control (the ability to regulate your own emotional ups and downs) are more predictive of later success than measures like IQ (which are largely reliant on vocabulary and numerical reasoning measures) (Alloway & Alloway 2010; McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2006). Additionally, working with children in creative ways (e.g. aerobics, yoga, computer games) that work to build these skills has been shown to be more effective than paper and pencil methods of training executive function (Diamond, 2011).

The thing is, those skills of self-regulation and executive function carry you over the long haul. They are the quintessential foundation to learning, building relationships, and success in not just an academic environment, but in every environment. Those skills are the building blocks for a successful life. Not just success in school.

 

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So how do we foster those skills in early childhood? Well, frankly, by letting kids be kids. By providing play environments where they can learn about mud and bugs and trees and plants. By letting them dig in the sandbox for buried treasure because they’re pretending to be pirates searching for gold. By giving them an opportunity to negotiate the finer points of playing house with other kids. By providing a safe, secure, environment with the freedom to play, laugh and learn.

Those early years are a time of wonder, and should be filled with opportunities to see, touch, smell, hear and taste the many varied and fascinating things the world has to offer. The memories of swinging on the playground swings feeling the wind whipping past, looking through a kaleidoscope to see the spinning colors and shapes, touching the soft fur of a puppy or the course bark of a tree, tasting cool fresh squeezed lemonade on a hot day. It’s no coincidence those are the memories kids will cherish long after they’ve moved on to school.

Because those are the things that are most important.

The biggest hurdle then, is proving that more time spent exploring and learning about the world actually equals greater success. And this responsibility should not fall on the teachers of our young children. It’s the responsibility of those doing the measuring to be more savvy, more creative, and more innovative in the way that they measure success.

Standardized testing is one piece of the equation to be sure. But it can’t be the only piece, or we’ll fail, again, to prove that any of this funding and increased effort in the early years made the least bit of difference.

I love what Michael Quinn Patton says in reference to the differences between quantitative versus qualitative research – and it fits so well in this context too.

“A questionnaire is like a photograph. A qualitative study is like a documentary film. Both offer images. One, however—the photograph—captures and freezes a moment in time...the other—the film—offers a fluid sense of development, movement, and change.” (Patton, 2002, p. 54).

The photograph of standardized testing captures a day, a moment in time. It doesn’t capture the ringing of a child’s laughter, the joyful exclamation of discovery, the comfortable sigh of peaceful exhaustion.

In short, the photograph is not enough. And I hope we will see that in time.

__________________________

References:

Alloway, T.P. & Alloway, R. G. (2010). Inves­ti­gat­ing the pre­dic­tive roles of work­ing mem­ory and IQ in aca­d­e­mic attain­ment. Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Child Psy­chol­ogy, 106(1), 21-29.DOI: http://10.1016/j.jecp.2009.11.003

Diamond, A. & Lee, K. (2011). Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science, 333, 959-964.

McClelland, M. M., Acock, A. C. & Morrison, F. J. (2006). The impact of kindergarten learning-related skills on academic trajectories at the end of elementary school. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(4), 471-490. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2006.09.003.

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods 3rd edition. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks: CA.

Seeing the forest for the trees

So on the bus last week I finally got the time to read an interesting article that’s been staring at me from the ever growing “articles I should read” pile that sits on my desk, judging me for not actually reading any of them.

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Yeah, you know, that pile.

This article by Greg Duncan from University of California Irvine hit on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: interdisciplinary work.

This relates some to the topic I wrote about a few weeks ago here where I discussed the need for a variety of perspectives and ways of knowing in order to successfully get the job done.

Duncan takes the position that the field of child development could really benefit from broadening its scope to begin enhancing the collaboration with experts in other disciplines to more fully understand the human condition. He notes that child development research, partly due to its relative infancy in terms of scientific progress, has not yet begun the necessary branching out to encompass other disciplines’ conceptualizations of the world to better advance existing developmental theories.

He uses some great examples of cases in which combining child development research with data from economic studies has enhanced our understanding of complex social problems in a way that provides useful information for decision makers.

Really, in this article, Duncan relays something I think we all need to hear occasionally:

There are things others can tell us that are valuable, worthwhile.

The thing is, despite child development research being in relative nascent stages compared to things like physics or astronomy, it is constantly in the public limelight. Nary a legislative session goes by without bills being debated that are pertinent to the welfare of kids and families. I don’t often hear of bills that require physicists to weigh in on important social or economic matters, unless it’s in support of more research funding. Matters of physics are usually considerably less controversial than things like funding for education or health.

Education and health are so prominent in our lives because we all are, or have all been, kids and families.

There is need for research understanding in child development to weigh in on matters of policy – to help bridge the gap between what we know is good for kids and what we do for the good of kids. But the ability of child development research to coherently address the breadth of what’s required for major policy decisions is limited. Unfortunately, tackling issues of ensuring positive outcomes for children while also providing assurances of return on an economic investment, is something that basic child development research can seldom do effectively.

And it's because we lack the breadth of scope Duncan is talking about.

So why doesn’t this breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge exist, especially when there is clearly a need for it?

Well there are a few reasons for this that I see:

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1.   Scientific process: Fields like child development are constantly pressured to follow a strict scientific method, complete with randomized control trials and complex statistical modeling. Applied research, which is considerably more messy because it operates in the real world, often lacks that intensive rigor. Applied research is then often viewed as a less worthwhile form of research, despite the fact that it might be more pertinent to the big questions at hand.

2.   Academic silos: Researchers traditionally live a very isolated existence. They know “their people” very well, and become incredible experts in their very specific field, but often do not branch out to learn about experts in other fields. (If I had a dollar for every time people within MY OWN UNIVERSITY asked what my group, the Extension Children, Youth and Family Consortium, does—even though we’ve been around for over 20 years—I’d be a very rich woman.) 

3.   Career pressures: To survive in academia you have to publish, A LOT. And the only way to ensure you publish is by carving out your niche and keep chipping away at that niche until it gives you a career. Unfortunately, that chipping away also prevents you from focusing much outside of your little corner of the world. You’re driven to focus on the minutia, rather than the bigger picture, because the minutia is where the career, and funding pressures, come from. Until that changes (don’t hold your breath), little else will.

I don’t mean for it to sound so bleak, because truthfully it’s not. There have been sizable advancements made in application of child development theory and practice over the last 10-15 years.

But we could always do more.

Duncan’s point is that only through deepening AND broadening the scope of the field can we truly make the progress that is encouraged, even required of us. The cross-disciplinary process requires creative thinkers and innovators to make connections across fields of study we’d never imagine could help inform questions about the biggest social and economic issues of our day.

And who are scientists but creative thinkers?

We just need an ever so slight shift in that creative energy. We need a call to look up from the lab bench to see the world around us.

To see the forest for the trees, and do something about it.

Forest sunrise (via stock.xchng)

Reference: Duncan(2012). Give us this day our daily breadth. ChildDevelopment, 83(1), 6-15.