It seems everywhere we turn these days, we see references to childhood trauma. Also called toxic stress, or adverse childhood experiences, it refers to the profound and long-lasting effects that traumatic experiences can have on children. What kind of experiences are we talking about? For starters, family dysfunction, an incarcerated family member, substance abuse, domestic Read More
The connection between early literacy and incarceration
The rumor was false but the connection was real. In our guest blog, educator Stan Lujan tackles the connection between Alaskans in prison and literacy. As Stan notes in his testimony to the House Finance Committee, prison planners do not look to reading scores to predict how many prison beds they’ll need. But the connection Read More
Where we are
As many Alaskans know, Best Beginnings took a major body blow with a 66 percent reduction in state funding for the fiscal year that began July 1. For the current year, Best Beginnings is receiving $320,000 from the state, down more than $600,000 from previous years. Best Beginnings is tackling the challenge in several ways, Read More
Pediatricians’ Rx for new parents: Read to your baby.
It was great news recently, when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced it is asking its 62,000 members to urge parents to read to their children as soon as they’re born. For the first time, the AAP will promote early literacy—beginning from an infant’s very first days—as an “essential” component of primary care visits. Read More
It’s everywhere…and in more ways than one
I’ve been watching our four 3-year-old grandchildren demonstrate STEM skills. They turned over rocks to look for worms and found “creatures” hiding in puddles at Kincaid Beach. They planned and built Lego spaceships and tall towers and knocked them apart to see how the pieces would fall. They passed along my iPad when the timer Read More
We must change it!
Recently I learned this heartbreaking 2012 statistic: 47% of Alaska children with substantiated reports of harm were under the age of 6. These are our youngest and most vulnerable precious children. More than a million children in America experience child maltreatment each year – Alaska has among the highest per capita rates of child abuse Read More
Hectic lives
“Hectic” is how many young parents I know describe their everyday lives. Yet they really want to spend time with their young children and help those brains grow. Over the years, as a parent and now a grandparent, I’ve learned a few tricks. Busy times often present wonderful opportunities for your child to explore the Read More
Why the 30 million word gap is so important
Our words count. In more ways than many of us ever realized. It’s been 18 years since Betty Hart and Todd Risley published their landmark study on the giant gap – 30 million – in words heard by young children depending on their socio-economic status. In the last six months, we’ve seen an explosion of Read More
Attendance matters, even in child care
If somebody asks whether showing up for work every day makes a difference in how well someone does his job, you’d probably think, “Of course it does.” We have the same response about students’ attendance at school. To mark September as the first-ever Attendance Awareness Month, Debi Baldwin (a Best Beginnings board member and director Read More
Our role in Imagination Library: Something quite different
You might be surprised to learn that Best Beginnings doesn’t enroll a single child in Imagination Library. Yet through Best Beginnings and our generous supporters, 20,772 children – 38.5% of all Alaska children under 5 – are now receiving a book every month through their local Imagination library. So what exactly do we do? We Read More
