Harvard Center shares infographic on environment's role in early brain development

  • February 25, 2019
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   early-learning
brain
Harvard University’s Center for the Developing Child is a great resource for the latest about the intersection of science and early childhood.
It’s a field called epigenetics and it helps researchers understand how experiences that children have in their earliest years impact the brain — and what that can mean in that child’s future.
The link between what children experience in their early lives and the impact on them as adults because of it has been the subject of much research.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and healthcare company Kaiser Permanente began a study in 1995 trying to follow the effect that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) have on children.
The study found some experiences early in life can actually change the physical or chemical structure of the brain. Those changes can impact that child’s mental and physical well-being long into adulthood.
What science tells us about how early experiences a child’s brain is an important foundation of the Studer Community Institute’s mission to our community through a focus on early education.
If the foundation for school readiness begins from a child’s first days of life, our journey toward creating the best community we can must begin there.
With parents.
Parenting is the toughest job you’ll ever love. 
And that’s parents need all the help they can get. 
By giving parents the latest information about how talking to their baby can help make that little brain strong, healthy and ready to learn, we take another step on this journey. 
And only by making that trip together — as an entire community whether we are parents or not — will truly prosper.
The link between school readiness and markers of adult success like high school graduation, higher education completion, wage rates and quality of life are clear. 
Children who are ready for kindergarten have a better chance of reading at grade level by third grade. And kids who read at grade level by third grade have a better chance of graduating high school on time.
Kids who graduate high school on time are more likely to succeed in higher education -- a milestone that increases their earning power as adults.
Adults with better earning power turn into employees or entrepreneurs who give back to the community in their own turn.
They become taxpayers and citizens who want their community to continue to grow.
They become parents who one day pass those same lessons onto their children.
That’s the pathway to a vibrant community, a place where — as Mayor Vince Whibbs Sr. used to say — thousands live the way millions wish they could.
That can be Pensacola, if we choose to make it so.
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