To fully support and prepare young children for school, we must first recognize and foster the incredible brain development that occurs in the first five years of life.  Children’s brains develop rapidly during this time, and connections become more refined.  Thus, we must provide stimulating, enriching, and age-appropriate environments and interactions to ensure that we maximize the opportunity for exploration and learning.  High quality early care and education settings are key venues for young children to “learn how to learn,” which includes fundamental academic skills such as counting or pre-reading, but also social development through interactions and cooperation with peers, learning to follow instructions, and important linkages to health, nutrition, and social support services.  As the majority of young children are in non-parental care on a regular basis at some point in their childhood, it is vital to ensure that early child care and education settings are of a high quality, which includes qualified teachers, low teacher-child ratios, small class sizes, developmentally appropriate curricula, and parental involvement.

Doctors' Advocacy:

• Docs can encourage parents of their young patients to connect with local Child Care Resource and Referral agencies or the NAEYC to enroll their child in a high-quality child care setting (1-800-424-2246, www.childcareaware.org, www.naeyc.org).  Docs can also talk to parents about the importance of reading to their children and enrolling them in a high-quality pre-kindergarten program
• Docs can serve on the advisory board or make presentations to parents of local Head Start programs to provide input from the health perspective
• Docs can advocate for Quality Rating Systems, which provide a comprehensive ongoing evaluation of early child care settings, and for higher early caregiver and teacher salaries, which allows for more credentialed and experienced professionals and reduces turnover in the field