First Years Of Life Crucial To Success

Almost 1 million of the children starting school this month already are destined for problems and failure.

They already have been so mentally malnourished during the crucial first five years of their lives that they won’t be able to keep up in class and will drop out or finish high school functionally illiterate.

Already, many of these children are snared in the sad cycle that includes high-risk birth, too-young a mother, single-parent home, poverty, school problems, gangs, drugs, unemployment, welfare, crime - and another generation of too-early pregnant mothers and high-risk babies.

Even good schools and skilled teachers - if these children are lucky enough to have them - won’t be enough to overcome completely the mental, psychological and social deprivation that marks these children’s infancy and preschool years.

None of the education and political fads of recent decades has helped much, if any. We’ve tried busing for integration, an emphasis on self-esteem, Afrocentrism, ungraded classrooms, uniforms. We’ve imposed higher standards or lowered them. We’ve tried mainstreaming, ending tracking and increasing or reducing special education. We’ve reorganized school systems to provide more local control. We’ve substantially raised school funding. We’ve had commissions and reports and studies and goals.

But all these efforts are too little, too late - and peripheral to the real problems.

Instead, we should be trying to break the poverty-and-failure cycle at the beginning - first, by increasing the percentage of children born healthy and wanted to parents ready and able to care for them and, second, by enriching children’s lives from birth on with mental, social and emotional nourishment.

No one has tried harder and more wisely to accomplish these goals than Irving B. Harris, a Chicago businessman, philanthropist, early childhood advocate and education innovator.

Harris’ new book, “Children in Jeopardy: Can We Break the Cycle of Poverty?” published by the Yale University Press, makes a strong and urgent case for devoting more money and resources to the first years of life, especially for at-risk youngsters.

Those are the years when the brain grows most rapidly and develops the interconnections that allow it to function intelligently. Mental malnourishment can stunt the brain’s physical growth and lower a child’s potential IQ for the rest of his life. Even the best of schools cannot make up completely for the lack of essential learning stimulation in the years when the brain needs it most to grow well.

Head Start helps, but not enough for at-risk children. Age 3 or 4 is too late.

Harris advocates training programs for parents starting before birth, even before conception. He wants visiting teachers to work with parents of infants and toddlers, child-parent centers to provide caring support and a national commitment to putting more resources into the first years of life when they will do the most good.

“Band-Aids will not solve the problems of poverty and family dysfunction,” Harris writes. “Somewhere in the cycle we must intervene to prevent its repetition. Scientists and researchers have shown that the best place to begin is at the beginning: from conception. …

“Focusing efforts on the earliest years of life will be the most effective and the least costly in both human and economic terms.”

Such help for all children who need it, Harris estimates, might cost $12 billion a year, most of it for training early childhood educators and developing facilities. But that, he emphasizes, is only 2.4 percent of the total the United States spends on education from kindergarten through college.

But money invested in early childhood learning can pay off four to seven times as much in money saved later on because of less school failure, delinquency, special education, unemployment and welfare, as a long-term study has shown.

After years of founding, funding and pushing programs to try to break the cycle of poverty and failure and help at-risk youngsters get a good start, Harris has no illusions about how difficult it can be.

He and his foundation, often with some public money, have funded education programs for early childhood teachers. He started the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a public-private partnership which helps teenage mothers be better parents and avoid unwanted pregnancies. He helped develop and backs Family Focus, which works with adolescents and babies.

He also planned and helps fund the innovative Beethoven Project, which aims to pour health, education and support services into the lives of youngsters in a Chicago public housing project, beginning before birth. The goals are to get the children prepared to succeed when they enter the Beethoven public school at age 5.

But the stresses on poor families and teen mothers can be enormous and can distract from their ability to parent well. Their needs for basics such as food, safe housing and protection from crime can be overwhelming.

Those who staff the helping programs must earn the trust of participants and learn to live with stress and discouragement.

In fact, it is so difficult to rescue so many children from poverty and failure, especially those who are born unwanted or mistimed, that Harris now is working to encourage contraception and make abortion more easily available.

Yet, there are many successes, as Harris reports. He is absolutely right about what kinds of intervention programs and early learning opportunities will work to prevent so much school failure and poverty. And he is painfully honest about how hard it will be to make the programs succeed for all at-risk youngsters.

Harris’ book is invaluable for its innovative ideas, its caring and its from-the-trenches accounts of how difficult solutions really are.

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