In his book When, Dan Pink writes about the importance of getting a good start. Timing is incredibly important in our lives, and getting a good start can make a huge difference down the road in terms of the outcomes we want to see (or avoid). I wrote about the importance of getting a good start in a career and matching ones skills with a position that values and rewards those skills, but Pink also addresses the importance of getting a good start in life as a baby. Specifically, Pink writes about programs that send nurses into homes to help low income and often low education families and mothers with caring for newborn children. The policies make a huge difference in getting little ones off to a good start.
“Nurse visits reduce infant mortality rates, limit behavior and attention problems, and minimize families’ reliance on food stamps and other social welfare programs. They’ve also boosted children’s health and learning, improved breast-feeding and vaccination rates, and increased the chances mothers will seek and keep paid work.”
Programs to help young children are expensive up-front, but have a huge amount of benefit down the road. There is a lot of inequity in our society, and while we like to believe that the outcomes we see are purely the results of our own hard work and effort, that isn’t always the case. Having a caring home with enough nutritious food and positive role models makes a big difference in our early development. Getting a good start is key for building good behaviors and becoming successful down the road. The important piece from Pink’s emphasis with this program, is the social nature of the program and how bringing mothers and families that might otherwise be economically and socially isolated into society helps them ensure their kids get a good start.
Pink continues, “Instead of forcing vulnerable people to fend for themselves, everyone does better by starting together.” I’ve written about the importance of social groups for our happiness, and here Pink shows that more social connection and helping create social bonds of support for early mothers leads to the positive outcomes we want to see for young children. There are policies we can put in place that would reward these types of social connections and make them more available, and the studies that Pink highlights suggest that the benefits of those programs would be huge for the children who get a better start in life, and would also flow to the rest of society. The programs might not be obvious at first, and the beneficiaries (in terms of the parents of the young children) might not seem deserving at first, but it is worth remembering that the people who will benefit in the long run includes all of us, and not just those initial families and children who receive the good start.
Novel Learning 