Williams - main messages

I’ve got a million messages I would like family physicians and pediatricians to carry forward. But if I boil it down to three; I think the first one is for them to realize and communicate the importance of the first 2000 days of life. And that’s preconception and on forward. The quality of the environment in our earliest life gets under our skin and lasts with us forever. We are launched on our trajectories of health and well-being as little human beings in those first few years, i.e. 2000 days of life. And so it’s really important that the physician know and understand this and support moms and dads and families to be the best that they can be through a time which can be transitionally quite difficult. The second thing I think they need to use the weight of their influence on is the fact that parenting is, in my view, not a congenital skill. You learn your parenting skills. And you either learn it from your own parents, the models of those around you, or what you learn and take up to learn through reading and academics. And so the physician valuing the importance of parenting as a skill, as an important thing for us all to be engaged in, I think is really important. The final thing I would ask, physicians to do with the early years, is to build bridges to the community resources. And again, use their influence to connect moms and kids and families from early on to the resources that are present in the community. Whether they’re parenting or early years centers, or quality childcare, home visiting programs if that’s what’s important. Using the physician credibility and influence I think is really important. That’s a job, a very important job, as the whole fabric of the community needs to come together around families. And having the physicians endorse that, and support that, and know what their local resources are is really important.