Halfon – transitioning

And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the early childhood world. We have all this new information about brain science, we have all this information about longitudinal studies about early development, about stress and toxic stress in children’s lives and what effects they have. Maternal depression, all this is like new energy coming in the system. We have a bunch of new techniques, we have better ways of measuring things.  

All this is coming into the early childhood world and it’s starting to break down the way that we have traditionally done things. And the system is trying to reformulate itself at a higher level of functionality and complexity. And doing that, you know, managing that process, or helping that process go along is not just working service by service: child care, throwing more money at child care, throwing more money at some health service and developmental screening. All those are important to get those particular services but oftentimes you have to work more at a sector level and then at a system level so how do you get all the early care and education services: the child care, the home day care, the special library services and reading services and literacy services – how do you get them as a sector to integrate because they’re all about education. How do you get all the health and mental health and early intervention services to all work together?  

And then how do you start to align the education and the health services so that you have mental health services in your child care centres and you’re doing, you know, the kind of promotion of literacy in your health care setting, So that creates those cross [unintelligible] bridges and linkages that actually begin to transform the system from it’s previous version to a higher level of function. And I think that that’s where we’re trying to head. We’re trying to move the system and some of that will take, you know, fixing what’s broken but we can’t spend all of our time just fixing what’s broken because a lot of that’s looking backwards and trying to repair a system from another era, another, another from an old design and what we really need to be doing is thinking about how do we redesign for the future. What kind of transitions need to take place? And what are the nudge strategies that need to take place? What are the nudge policies that we need? And what are the policy jolts that we need that are really going to take us to another level?