American Child Support

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The science is clear and unambiguous. The years immediately after a child’s birth are the most important for mental development. Long before a child ever attends school or even kindergarten—long before the child learns to speak—myriad neural connections are forming in the child’s brain. “[D]uring the first few years of life, more than one million neural connections are formed each second.”

Those connections fix the plasticity of the child’s brain for a lifetime. They influence, if not determine, his or her skill in observing, general intelligence, language and math skills, adaptability and emotional maturity. The richer and more numerous those connections are, the greater the child’s brainpower and appreciation of life.

As the great Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” In the US, formal education begins with kindergarten, at age five or six. So in our country formal education misses from 71% to 81% of the critical early period.

Wealthy parents fill this gap period by various means. They read their kids educational books, buy them educational toys, and expose kids to music and dance. Some hire superior day-care centers, even child psychologists. Some play Bach to fetuses still in the womb. Poor parents, who struggle to put food on the table and a roof over kids’ heads, do nothing of the kind.

This huge dichotomy in early-childhood care and education is, from a purely scientific perspective, the greatest conflict between America’s goals and the reality of life in the US. How can kids ever achieve equality of opportunity when their periods of most critical development are so unequal? It’s as if poor kids, as compared to middle-class and rich ones, start out life with sandbags tied around both feet.

Those sandbags stay there for life. On the average today, that means 75.1 years for males and 80.5 years for females. That’s a long time to carry extra weight!

Not all the government money that started flowing to parents with kids this week goes to kids in their early childhoods. Children up to seventeen are eligible. But the part that does go for early-childhood education marks a huge step toward enhancing social equality.

That step is long overdue. It’s too little and too late, and it only lasts one year. But it’s a lot better than nothing. We should make sure it’s just a beginning.

As a practical people, we Americans understand that education can make better citizens, smarter and more adaptable workers and (in rare cases) progenitors of scientific and technological “miracles.” That’s why we introduced compulsory basic education (through high school) and free or low-cost land-grant colleges, beginning in the nineteenth century.

But current science reveals the futility of those advances without proper early-childhood care and education. If we don’t pay attention to the immediate post-birth period, high-school and college may not matter. A kid’s future as a high-school or college dropout may already be baked in. Modern science tells us that early childhood is the fulcrum on which all later and higher education rests.

So if we want to be competitive in the coming global race for brains, we had better work on the part of life that matters the most: early childhood. At a minimum, we had better be sure that kids who spend more than half a day apart from their working parents have the best day care, with the best early-childhood education possible. Our nation’s future depends on it. That’s why PBS is spending an entire week on the issue, with a daily report on the dismal state of day care in our nation and what could be done about it.

Now that the money is beginning to roll out to families with kids, there are important political implications, too. Millions of parents will suddenly find it possible to feed, care for and educate their kids better. Some will spend the money on day care, or on better-quality day care.

At the moment, Democrats are energized and enraged about voting rights and voter suppression. There is talk of abolishing or downsizing the filibuster to stop the spate of vote-suppression measures passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

But fixing the filibuster is a heavy lift, and there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Millions of recipients of the child-friendly money will suddenly understand how government can work for them. Those who never voted, or voted seldom, will begin to see how their votes might matter. They will see more clearly as their children—better fed, better cared for and better educated—begin to thrive.

To say this is an opportunity for voter education is an understatement. It may be too late to make sure President Biden’s name appears on all the checks, as the Demagogue did with his Covid relief checks. (To speed the money to its parents, much of it has gone by direct deposit, not checks.) But it’s never too late to begin reminding recipients which party and what President is responsible for the wherewithal to take better care of their kids. The government must do what it can legally to make the point, and every voter education and empowerment group should take it from there. This is the policy-promotion opportunity of a generation.

But it’s far from the end. The current tranche of payments for children lasts only one year. The program needs to continue. Most important, it needs to create a nationwide system of universal, high-quality day care for children so that both parents can work and kids can receive the best early-childhood education our society can provide.

This is not a “women’s issue.” It’s a national-security, competitiveness and survival issue. Now that we know that the earliest years matter most, we have no excuse for not applying that science in action. Surely China, Germany and our other competitors will.

Our own forebears recognized the importance of high-school and college education. If we miss the boat on early-childhood education, our “exceptionalism” will dissolve, and in far less time than the average human life-span.

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