How Early Development Impacts Education and the Workforce

Building a capable workforce and thoughtful, engaged citizenry for the future, starts with each person’s primary caregivers in the first six years of life. Yet today, we (the broad, societal “we”) keep looking around at each other, panic stricken, saying “What do we do? Why are so many kids being diagnosed with autism, speech delays, and behavioral disorders?” And while theories abound that attempt to explain these substantive changes in our children, few people have connected more than a few dots in the broad picture of childhood, except for us at Birth2Work.

I pulled our program guest, Judy Towne Jennings, PT, MA, literally right out of Newsweek, in which I first read her name in association with Christina Gilliam’s interview “Giving Your Baby Enough Tummy Time.”  Judy has given valuable, easy to understand answers born of her own 40+ years of experience as a physical therapist, on the crucial importance of “tummy time for infants.”

Giving babies regular time on their stomachs while they are awake and supervised is critical for developing a baby’s motor skills, like gripping and grasping, holding up the neck and head, developing shoulder and core strength, not to mention eye movement that must precede the ability to read, and tongue movement important to speech development. I have been talking about this for years. If you want to know why your child’s physical development is so crucial to long-term brain development and capacity building for the future join us today. You won’t want to miss this interview.