It's never been truer than it is today that hard skills will get you an interview but soft skills will get the job for you and enable you to keep it. As with so many other individual skill sets, the foundation for these soft skills is best laid in the earliest years of a child's life. More and more, businesses don't see a college degree as a guarantee that someone has the skills for success.
No one in our community should care more about optimal brain development for our youngest children than our business leaders. Their competitiveness, their profits, their tax burdens, and ultimately, their corporate futures depend on it. The fact is that there are no economic strategies that pay greater returns on investment than strategies to give every child a fair start in life.
Home visting programs help promote positive parenting behaviors in order to promote a healthy home environment. These programs can help prevent child neglect or abuse. In Memphis specifically, the Nurse-Family Partnership home visiting program has reduced health care encounters by 28% and hospitalizations for injuries of young children by 79%. The Nurse-Family Partnership program is just one of many home visiting programs.
One of the most distressing and challenging aspects of parenting is figuring out the best way to deal with a child’s aggression. Fortunately for parents, working with children to learn to control themselves during their earliest years has been shown to be the most effective way of preventing the development of behavioral issues as they mature.
Violence and conflict in the home can have detrimental consequences to a developing baby. A child does not have to be the direct recipient of the violence to be a victim. Simply experiencing a toxic home environment can produce negative consequences on a child. The more frequent and the more violent conflicts are, the more susceptible the child will be. The consequences, both physically and psychologically, of a chaotic home environment can last a lifetime.
Why do people help perfect strangers? That question really hit me last week. I was driving on Airways Boulevard at Lamar when a young couple in an old car rhythmically motioned with downward-pointing fingers, like John Travolta dancing in "Saturday Night Fever." These strangers were telling me that my back tire was quickly going flat.
