Sad child

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

The #1 marker of a superb speaker is not in the eloquence presented.  It’s not how smart she sounds or the effective body language he displays. It’s not in how many times she makes us laugh.

Nope. In my opinion, the #1 marker is how effectively the speaker can get you to think about an issue that you weren’t even fully aware was an issue.

I spent this evening at a live presentation by Robert Putnam, best-selling author of Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis. What we have believed for years to be true (work hard and you can do anything) turns out NOT to be true for more and more children. Putnam refers to it as a “disturbing opportunity gap” between children from families that are financially secure and those that are not.

While I love stories in presentations (and he had some of those), I’m not usually fond of too many statistics, charts, or graphs. But his science was both captivating and compelling.

Using a study by the National Academy of Sciences, he reminded us that we continue to learn about ourselves and what powerful and long-lasting aspects affect us. It turns out that children are primarily shaped in the prenatal period through the early childhood years.

So for those children who don’t have a great beginning, they are already too far behind to catch up before they hit fourth grade.

In the clip I’ve attached at the end, he talks about the scissor-type discrepancies in how the “haves” and “have-nots” raise their children. In everything from the amount of money spent on a child, time used eating dinner as a family, a child’s participation in school-based extracurricular activities, the amount of social trust a child feels, involvement with church…the gap gets wider and wider as time goes on.

I was especially taken with the gap shown involving the time spent by both parents in developmental child care. He referred to it as the “Goodnight Moon” time, based on the beloved children’s book by that title. Developmental time is time spent reading to a child, talking and playing with them, teaching them how to do something.

This time is absolutely vital to a child’s well-being. But just consider the lack of time with which a single parent working two jobs might have to contend.

So Putnam inspired me to read his book and continue to think deeply and broadly about what or where my part in the effort to fix this crisis is exactly.

And, of course, he influenced me to tell you about it so you can do the same.

He ended the program by saying we’re all in this together and that we will fix this. It’s not “my” children or “your” children. It’s OUR children.

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Interview clip of Putnam