Model and Strategy
Research shows that the quality of early childhood development strongly predicts health and socioeconomic outcomes as adults. Eighty percent of a child’s brain is formed by age three, and is influenced in large part by their parents’ words. The more words children hear spoken to them, the more words they learn. The proposed project team will work with low-income parents in a co-learning process to develop and test hospital and clinic-based strategies to increase verbal engagement between the parents and their children. The ultimate purpose of the project is to make child literacy a routine part of pediatric care, much like hearing screening and ADHD treatment, which were added to the pediatric scope of care decades ago. This approach to the topic of early literacy is innovative, including the promotion of child literacy as a health issue, co-learning with parents, parent literacy, evaluating hospital-based strategies, and creating a pediatric learning network on early literacy.
Impact
There are three communities that will be impacted by our successful implementation of this project. The first is our providers at BCHO. Including families/consumers in the core design of interventions is a new concept for many service environments. Co-learning is a process which could influence how many services are designed at BCHO. The second community to be impacted will be the children and families. Long term, the goal is to change the nature of primary care by integrating school success and parent- child attachment as crucial health issues. Thirdly, the learning community has the ability to impact large segments of the pediatric community by influencing and coordinating approaches to decreasing the word gap and improving early literacy as an integral part of children’s health.
Leadership
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Bertram Lubin
President