Healthy Children

 

   Physical activity of children seems to be the hot topic of conversation of everyone around the world. We need to care for our health early on and continue throughout life. We know from research that physical activity of infants and young children support healthy brain development and helps children become successful learners. We can do this by engaging children in healthy habits such as what we eat and how often we exercise.

   However accessing a child to find out if they are healthy or not depends on how often they have access to health clinics or doctors. Yes there are required times in school age children to have physicals and blood work before entrance into certain grades, but, how often they are seen in between is also very important for access their overall health. Health care is an issue for many different countries, as well as the United States.

These are just some interesting things I found as I researched this topic:

Prevalence of Obesity Among Children and Adolescents: United States, Trends 1963-1965 Through 2007-2008

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_07_08/obesity_child_07_08.htm

 Summary Health Statistics for U.S. Children: National Health Interview Survey, 2010

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_250.pdf

Why Do School Aged Children Need Health Insurance?

http://familiesusa2.org/assets/pdfs/school-kids-need-insurance.pdf

Zero to Three

   Zero to Three (http://www.zerotothree.org/) is an excellent source and a wealth of knowledge; I go on this site every week to find out what is new and the current news, September 2010. This week I went directly to the “Down load of the week” tab. This is current information and the pamphlet is titled, Expanding Access to Early Head Start: State Initiatives for Infants and Toddlers at Risk (http://www.zerotothree.org/public-policy/pdf/expanding-access-to-ehs-paper.pdf). This is always an ongoing issue with early childhood education. This pamphlet tells about how research shows that young children growing up in poverty experience poorer health, developmental delays, learning disabilities, hunger, and are reported in more cases of neglect than their peers. This can result in becoming non-successful in school and less likely to become productive adults.

   Despite the difficult economical times 23 states have at least one initiative that builds on federally Early Head Start funded programs. Out of these states nine have initiatives that have extended the day or year of services, nineteen have expanded the number children and pregnant women served, and two states provide assistance and resources to child daycare providers. This is definitely taking steps in the right direction and a start in providing the assistance and programs needed for the growing demand for this progress.    As proven by these states currently implementing these (EHS) initiatives, hopefully more states will follow in the efforts of making this program available to more infants, toddlers and families. However I am very sad to say Kentucky is not one of these states listed in the initiative progress.

Resource

Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families
http://www.zerotothree.org/. Retrieved on October 12, 2012.

Economic return on early childhood investment

While surfing the internet this week I found a very interesting and knowledgeable person, James Heckman. James Heckman is a Nobel Memorial prize winner in Economics, and is an expert in the economics of human development. Heckman has proven that investing in early childhood development has great economic gains. In this video I found on youtube http://www.heckmanequation.org/about-professor-heckman, he articulately expresses the importance of early childhood investment. He states that early childcare is not only a social issue, but also an economic issue and education is at the heart of the economy. We need to invest in childhood development to gain skills for workforce development, and in turn, we will have less high school dropouts, and crime. He states a proportion of ages 18-25 are going on to college and others are dropping out of society. This creates a top half and a bottom half in which the bottom half is not working or contributing to society, creating a drain. This man sparked my interest and I decided to find his website, which has a vast amount of knowledge and videos to watch. I would highly recommend anyone interested, to visit his website http://www.heckmanequation.org/about-professor-heckman.

Resource

http://www.heckmanequation.org/about-professor-heckman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO2oFtY7tZA&feature=fvwrel