5 connections that will change children’s lives | Laura Jana | TEDxOmaha

What if despite our best intentions, despite all our business savvy based on data-driven technology and everything that the information age has put at our disposal, we were raising our

children

to have success in a world that simply no longer exists? So this is the question. That has led me to conclude that we have some fundamentally important

connections

to make, but first let me explain what it was after 20 years in Pediatrics and parenting that led me to connect the dots. A couple of years ago I attended a national conference. and I had the opportunity to chat with a very successful fellow attendee who kindly offered me a signed copy of his book and casually added: I'd love to know what you think of it, so I took it seriously, read his book and shared my opinion that It read like an insightful book for parents and one that particularly resonated with my own approach to the complicated task of raising productive

children

in the 21st century.

Now I realized that it would be kind of boring if it weren't for the part of the story I left out, that the author of the book was the Silicon Valley visionary and co-founder of Linkedin, Reed Hoffman, and that his book, the startup of you, is It's pretty safe to assume that it has never and

will

never end up in the parenting section of any bookstore, but the connection between its convictions and mine were so striking that it left me with the idea that perhaps what we need is more of a startup approach to your baby because while marijuana and many others in the world of business leadership and innovation are actively identifying the 21st century tool set of skills we need to succeed in the business of raising children to be prepared for life.

Adults are responsible for assembling this same tool, we just work later and in some cases much further, even at such a young age. es z 0 to 5 now for those of you who are not used to thinking of life-ready 18-year-olds as the most important product our economy produces or, for that matter, of those responsible for raising them as part of a sector defined of the economy, the young human being. In total, the capital sector in the United States is estimated to account for up to 10.5% of GDP, which would make it 25% larger than the financial sector. The size of the automotive industry and, like any critical sector of our economy, the youth human capital sector must adapt our thinking from the local and linear to the global and exponential from the industrial age to the information age.

The question, of course, is how and the answer, I believe, lies in five strategic

connections

first connection that connects what we do now with what we want later now no matter how simple a concept it may seem. I worry that the two have become so disconnected from each other that we almost systematically direct kids to One Direction and then Wonder. Years later, why didn't they end up in the other one? Let me give you an example. The Five Wise Men is an executive training program intended to help businesses better identify the root causes of problems by using an iterative questioning technique that involves asking why five As a business owner, this makes sense, but always leaves me with another question: when is the last time you

will

spend time with a 2 year old?

Because if many questions are asked that we will ultimately value, then perhaps we should spend less time on early childhood training. Why do they? Creativity is another good example. In a global survey of more than 1,500 CEOs, creativity was identified as the most crucial factor for future success when moving from business to one of the strongest findings In social sciences we know that intrinsic motivation is essential for creativity and, on the contrary, extrinsic rewards almost kill it. Now explain to me, you will pee to buy M&Ms because this and many others, if you do this, I will reward you for your approaches to raising children. has become so common that the mere suggestion of not offering rewards for everything from peeing in the potty to going to sleep risks being perceived as the Grinch who stole Christmas and, more importantly, makes it clear that our way of raising children remains the same.

More transactional than transformational, the other thing we know about creativity, by the way, is that, by definition, it requires innovative thinking. If what we want is innovative thinking, then perhaps we should spend less time and money promoting to children what's inside the box. and give more real value to open creative play with a box. Check out any Parenting Magazine book or blog and you'll discover that what we also do a lot in the early years has a lot to do with everyday life. Every day we cry Clothes, car seats, and diapers, and while they are all very important, I fear that together they cause us to lose sight of the bigger picture of our parenting, get lost in the short term, and get stuck in the parenting equivalent of living by quarterly profits Every time we bemoan the fact that babies don't come with an owner's manual, we're allowing the how and what of parenting to eclipse our why.

Instead, what I suggest that the world of parenting and the youth human capital sector needs is a strategic strategy. plan because with thousands of problems crying out for precious hours in the day, it is true that spending time planning for the future is not easy, but operating without a plan is more difficult and this last thought, by the way, comes almost word for word from another highly unlikely parenting book: It's called business plans for dummies, so that's the case to more strategically connect what we do with what we want. Connection number two, connecting the playroom to the boardroom, involves clarifying what we really want for our children, to raise them into happy, healthy, successful adults.

It's as universal an emissions statement as any, but from the research Gallup gave us, we can now more clearly identify five essential elements of professional, financial, social, physical and community well-being, all important, but for now let's just focus on in professional success and 21st century boardroom skills. It is necessary to achieve it now. I realize that asking you to work backwards and make some kind of direct connection between, say, workforce development and preschool play is a bit like asking you to recite the alphabet backwards, but when applying new knowledge, you actually it becomes very easy. We worked our way up to the fundamental ABCs of success and developing 21st century skills, so let's start with Zig Ziggler's statement that you don't build businesses, you build people who build businesses, which should lead us to wonder what kind of people we want. develop and what kind of skills we want them to have communication collaboration curiosity critical thinking questioning adaptability the ability to fail Those of you in business will clearly recognize these critical skills as the key competencies needed in today's knowledge-based economy, but do you know ?

Who else is equally committed to fostering these critical skills? If you're thinking to yourself: High School Steam Education Teachers, you'd be right, but you don't think about the past enough, think about it, use your words, keep your ears open, take turns, don't give up. learn to play well with others and, in the same testing environment, these social-emotional skills are preschool skills and, from my unique point of view, which spans the worlds of business and early childhood, something particularly surprising is happening with calls to action like participating, not pampering and playing. To win, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the latest literature from Harvard Business Review, Google, or Gallup and that from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

If we really want to strategically build our human capital pipeline, then we need to focus on the early development of foundational skills because we know that young children don't simply acquire these essential skills that need to be fostered and when it comes to how to best foster them it's not rocket science. , but it is certainly brain science, which leads us to the intentional wiring of neurons in the developing brain. Babies are born with around 100 million neurons that connect at a mental expansion rate of a thousand new neuronal connections per second. The result is that around 85% of brain growth is thought to occur in the first 5 years with the basic circuits for vision and hearing forming immediately after birth and followed later in the first year by language, such as the building blocks of the coveted 21st century toolkit—thinking, reasoning, communicating—the basic circuits for these higher cognitive functions. it's largely established at five years, like your LinkedIn profile;

However, it is not simply that whoever has the most connections wins, but the developing brain is programmed to strengthen neural pathways. Paths that are used and those that are not are eliminated. It's not the strength of these early connections that really matters, so how can we strengthen them? Interestingly, the same rules of engagement that we are now discovering apply to increasing productivity in the workplace also apply to raising productive children, given the leadership role mothers often play. In the game, it's not surprising that they are sometimes called the CEOs of their families, but given how much we now know about the importance of commitment in both corporate and family CEO jobs, I suggest we maybe

change

the title to Director of Engagement and while we're at it, assign values ​​a little more equitable because, practically speaking, it's really all the day-to-day back-and-forth interactions with babies that serve as the 21st century recipe for success, described by the Harvard Center for the Developing Child serving and returning The key ingredient is the care of responsive adults, so to help give you a picture of what I'm talking about, I want you to imagine a little baby, he smiles Spontaneously, you respond by smiling at him and in tune with his reaction, he and his developing neurons take this as positive feedback and before you know it, you now have the most anticipated developmental milestone for four-month-olds, the social smile. , now think about doing the CS and this seemingly simple back-and-forth serve-and-return interaction is literally laying the social and neural foundation.

For language and communication, if what we really want to cultivate is executive function and social-emotional skills, then perhaps we should focus more of our collective efforts and funding on supporting strategic brain-building activities like speaking, singing, reading books to children. babies, connection number four. reconnecting health and learning Joselyn Elders, former US Surgeon General, once said that you cannot educate a child who is not healthy and that you cannot keep a child healthy who has not been educated like practicing pediatrician. I was certainly used to dealing with both important aspects of children's

lives

on a daily basis, but what may be a little surprising is that this didn't really

change

much when I left the clinical practice of Pediatrics and opened an educational Child Care Center for 200 students where I continued to address everything from allergies to asthma. autism and ADHD along with classroom management and curriculum planning, but the most common question I get asked these days is do I miss being a pediatrician and my answer is that while the health and education systems continue to function almost completely as separate entities, Coming to realize that in a child's life this disconnect between health and learning is artificial and represents a real threat just when our world is shifting focus from illness to wellness and prevention, the causes fundamental diseases date back to the early years. of life and as we realize the importance of sleep, nutrition and exercise, we must also recognize that what happens in early childhood does not stay in early childhood, but rather plays an important role in determining the future health and education of children in their life trajectories.

In other words, your overall future well-being. Economist James Hekman and his colleagues recently evaluated the results of a well-known social experiment from the 1970s in which 100 disadvantaged North Carolina children were given the opportunity to attend a high-quality preschool, after decades of data. As might be expected, participants demonstrated better educational outcomes, but what was unexpected and not previously assessed was that they all demonstratedsignificant long-term health benefits in such critical areas as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and obesity when asked what happens to their preschool attendance outcome. In such striking improvements in health, economists concluded that they could not identify one factor, but in fact what we need to do is completely rethink our approach to early childhood to cross the silos of health and education and actively work to integrate critical aspects of early learning. with health and nutrition, so if what we want to promote is health and lifelong learning, perhaps we should consider prescribing high-quality preschool, especially for those children whose life trajectories are most at risk and connection number five that connects with the world in which our children will live as leaders. and engagement directors dedicated to setting our children on the path to success, we must do a better job of connecting to the world our children will live in, in a globally connected world that, in many ways, is unrecognizable from the world in the one we grew up with.

I'd like to think there's no need for a pediatrician to point out that technology is going to play a dominant role, but how early and how best to introduce it is still to be determined, and as we race to find out, there's a battle going on. is being freed. A battle is being waged between those who see tremendous social and educational potential in technologies and those who have very valid concerns about technology's virtual invasion of childhood. What is clear in the words of Dr. Michael Rich, a Harvard media researcher, is that technology is now like the air our children breathe, yes, it runs the risk of being contaminated, but it is here to stay and the success of our children will depend of it.

As digital immigrants, now responsible for raising a generation of digital natives, we owe it to our children to embrace this. or close this technology generation gap and help them learn to use technology wisely and speaking of gaps, our children are entering a world that is full of gaps that extend from the boardroom to the playroom, from innovation skills and technology gaps to opportunity education and even word gaps. Making life-changing connections for children must include closing these gaps. It has long been recognized that children spend the first years of their

lives

learning to read and the rest of their lives reading to learn, so it should not be surprising to learn that the ability to read proficiently in third grade has been linked to everything , from high school graduation and future economic success to a country's global competitiveness and national security.

Would you like to know what is now believed to predict third grade reading scores? 18-month vocabulary that brings us back to the fundamental importance of attentive and responsive adults, deliberate connection of neurons, and development of 21st century strategic skills from the beginning, because 18 months really is too little to fail now, no matter how difficult it may be. seem to believe this. It's not really education, I'm talking about economics, data and technology, what I'm passionate about is your children and what I know is that we owe it to our children to apply all our business knowledge, smart data-driven technology and the entire era of the information. put within our reach, not to mention social sciences, neuroscience and economics, to give all children a solid foundation and the toolkit of 21st century skills that we know how to put together and we know they need to be successful.

Thank you.