White House ‘Baby Talk’ Raises Child Care’s Significance
It was no doubt the first time in U.S. history that an American president had sat in the ornate East Room of the White House to soak up four hours of baby talk.
On Thursday, President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton invited some of the country’s premier experts in child development to the Executive Mansion to review dramatic new findings on the way young children’s brains develop and to discuss the implications, both for public policy and parental care.
The neurobiologists, physicians and other specialists in early child development described research showing how quickly the brains of babies develop after birth, creating trillions of neural connections that either flourish or die off in response to experience. The vast majority of these synapses are formed during the first three years of life.
“Experience is essential for brain wiring,” Carla Shatz, a professor of neurobiology at UC Berkeley, said as she explained why it is essential for parents to touch, talk and read to, sing and otherwise nurture and stimulate their babies.
Dr. Patricia Kuhl, head of the speech and hearing sciences department at the University of Washington in Seattle, stressed that babies’ brains are busy coding and preparing for language well before they can speak, putting a responsibility on parents and child care givers to talk to newborns.
“When we speak to our children, something is happening,” she said. “Infants are born to learn. Our role is to be good partners in this learning process.”
Clinton unveiled some initiatives to focus federal money and resources to better meet the needs of infants and preschoolers.
He announced a Justice Department initiative called “Safe Start,” based on a program in New Haven, Conn., that trains police officers, prosecutors and parole officers in child development so they are better equipped to handle with sensitivity cases that involve children.
He also outlined a plan to use the military’s experience in running nurseries to improve civilian day care services. He directed the military’s child development programs, which have a reputation for high quality, to share their expertise with other groups.
Improving the quality of child care is particularly critical now, he said, because more than a million more infants and young children are expected to need child care services as their mothers go to work because of new welfare laws.
“This research has opened a new frontier,” Clinton said. “Great exploration is, of course, not new. . . . We have gone across the land. We have gone across the globe. We have gone into the skies. And now we are going deep into ourselves and into our children. In some ways, this may be the most exciting and important exploration of all.”
