The Beginning of Life – Importance of a community

This video is an excerpt from the documentary, “The Beginning of Life”, which was produced by Maria Farinha Filmes, with the support of Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal Foundation, the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Alana Institute and UNICEF. 

We thank them for sharing the video with the Science of Early Child Development.

Severino António, Ph. D.; Educator and Writer: One of the great solitudes of the contemporary world is the loss of community. We’ve lost our sense of community and children need that. They need other children, other people, not only when someone dies, but as an addition. Children need this expression. That’s why it’s so important to play together. That includes playing with the community, which is somehow a kind of bigger, universal family. 

Raffi Cavoukian; Founder, CENTRE FOR CHILD HONOURING: A caring community is the village that a child needs. to grow up healthy and wise. Every one of us: parents, teachers, caregivers, shopkeepers, policymakers, lawmakers. We each play an important part in creating a loving village. This is what children need in which to grow.

Manda Gillespie; Researcher and Author of Green Mama: It is so important, why do we act like it’s just the mother’s job to take care of that baby? Or just the family’s job? Why are we not saying this should be the job of our entire society? Why is this not the job of our governments? Why is this not the job of industry to help protect this little baby? This baby’s our future. Who’s gonna run the country and pay the taxes? Who’s gonna come up with the new inventions and, you know, the next vaccines or the next rocket ships? Who? That baby.

This whole community idea started because we wanted to be with our kids. As much as I want to be with them, I can’t be with them all the time. And I don’t want to just leave them somewhere, I want to keep them in our active lives. Today we have this group of six families, families of the heart, and we help each other out. Adults take turns being with the kids, and we help one another move forward. 

Adult: Do you think I can climb this tree?
Child: I think so.

Children get to coexist with adults who coexist. They see how relationships work and they reproduce it.

Joan Lombardi, Ph. D.; International specialist in child development and public policy: No family is self-sufficient. I depend on my siblings, my mother, and the agencies and policies that affect my family. There’s a huge gap between what our public policies look like and what families today need. And it’s this gap that’s hard to understand. Because we have policies that respond to other issues, but somehow we still think the family is self-sufficient rather than understanding that, in society today, we have to have policies that support the entire family. We’re in this together, and we have to support each other so that we can grow healthy children.