Heymann - economic investment

I think there are two things that mistakenly often keep countries from investing in young children.  The first is the notion that it competes with other investments, that we have to take away money from something else to invest in young children. And while that may be true for a very brief time, the returns to investing in young children are so powerful in terms of better economic outcomes for their families, better economic outcomes as the children grow, better educational outcomes, reduced adverse outcomes that it more than pays for itself, this is totally affordable.  The second is that we think it’s just easy to forget about young children.  They’re not claiming policy makers’ attention, they’re not organizing in the streets and they seem so resilient and of course in many ways they are resilient. But the price of not investing in them is enormously high, and the return is extraordinary. So I think the question for all of us is ‘How do we motivate our own governments to make this investment that we know could have such a powerful impact on the lives of everyone – on the lives of the children themselves, on their lives as they become adults and on the success of all our societies?’