Maine Children's Alliance : MeKids.org

Start ME Right

Michael is a rambunctious two and a half-year old who lives in northern Maine. Prior to Michael being born, his parents received home visits by a parent educator to help them with the challenges of raising their son. Both of Michael's parents had troubled childhoods and they say that without this help they would not have known how to handle their active little boy. Their educator has taught them ways to discipline Michael without losing patience and yelling, and they have tried hard to follow this advice. When Michael was a baby, his parents learned that they should talk and read to him often, even though he couldn't yet understand their words. Now, Michael is a child and his parents are proud of how well he is able to express himself. They worry, however, about how much more active he seems than other children his age. Their educator told them about a program that can screen Michael and determine whether he has a problem that requires treatment at this stage in his development. An appointment has been scheduled.
Michael's father drives a delivery truck but has recently seen his hours reduced. Because of the loss of income, Michael's mother has taken a job as a cashier at the local supermarket. Their educator helped them find a child care program with a wonderful staff and a very good reputation. They are able to afford it because the center receives subsidies that supplement the parents' fees and enables the staff to maintain good quality care. Two weeks prior to Michael attending the center, his child care teacher visited Michael's home to meet him and to talk to his parents and their educator about his care. By communicating with each other, the teacher was able to gain a better sense of Michael's personality and development, and to learn what approaches were being used at home so that his care in both settings would be consistent.

Michael is doing beautifully at the center. He is learning greater self-control and how to use words instead of hitting when he has a conflict with another child. Michael's child care teacher and the family's educator communicate regularly and the child care teacher frequently meets with Michael's parents to find out how things are going at home, update them about Michael's progress and answer any questions. Michael is developmentally on-target and is even ahead of many children in language skills.

The care and nurturing Michael is receiving from all of the adults in his life should be the right of every child in Maine. It is this vision that provides the impetus for the Start Me Right legislative package.

The most recent research shows that:

At risk children need both a high quality child care/early education program and services to help their parents with their child rearing responsibilities if they are to achieve the greatest gains in cognitive and social skills.
These services need to be coordinated so that the child care worker can support the parents and so that the care of the child is consistent in both settings.

In a recent paper, Louise Stoney, a leading national expert on child care and early education, wrote,

Rather than implementing early education, child care and parent support as separate strategies, these efforts should be viewed as part of the whole. The most effective outcomes will be achieved when all three approaches are combined

Maine's Start Me Right legislation is on the cutting edge of this research.

In Maine, the child care community and those who provide family support/home visitation services have joined forces to advance a single package of reforms called Start Me Right to expand and improve services to children in all settings of care, beginning even before birth. Their joint efforts reflect the need to approach children's needs in a comprehensive, coordinated way and to provide help during the most critical stages of brain development.

The Impetus for a Joint Agenda:

The Start Me Right effort in Maine is borne out of the frustration of providers in the field about their own inability to serve all of the needs of an increasingly troubled population of children and families.

Child care workers wish they could do more to improve the home life of the children in their care whose well-being has become so important to them. But there is little opportunity for communication in the short time they are typically able to spend with parents at the beginning and end of each day. Their desire is to have more resources to help families at home; families who may not be well educated about child development and who are clearly feeling the strain of financial worries and a lack of family time.
Home visitors in Maine complain that after explaining to parents what their child needs to grow and thrive, often they are unable to refer them to good quality child care programs that the families can afford. Parents are told the right things to do at home but both the educator and the parents know that for most of the day the child is in substandard care, placed in front of a TV set. Good quality care seems to be out of their reach.

Their intuitive sense of what is wrong with our fragmented system, their recognition of the futility of doing one agenda without the other, is borne out in the research. It is not hard to understand why children do best when all of the adults in their lives, at home and in child care, are knowledgeable about their development and have the ability to meet their needs. When the system that is created enables these adults to communicate with each other, children then find the consistency and security necessary to explore and learn about their world.

The Start Me Right legislation embodies this common sense approach. There is no other statewide effort like it in the nation. By serving our children in a comprehensive, coordinated way in all settings of care, Maine can become a model for other states. We know what works for our children. We know what fuels their development. Now we must create a system that enables all of the adults in a child's life to work together and provide that fuel. By investing in the lives of our children today, we will reduce the future costs of juvenile justice and special education, and will ensure a skilled workforce creating a healthy economy. But most importantly, our healthy children today will be the healthy, well-educated parents and wage earners of tomorrow.
January, 1999

Updated: Sep 4th, 2008 - 15:24:01

A Strong and Powerful Voice to Improve the Lives of All Maine's Children, Youth and Families

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