I have a couple of things I\u2019d like to tell policy makers. One is – listen to the science. I think often policy is based on what people think people want to hear or their personal experience, but it\u2019s not based on science, so I think policy makers need to listen to the science. Second I think they need to pay careful attention to the science that for what happens early matters for what happens later. In this field referred to sometimes as developmental programming we can demonstrate that events that occur very early in life can have downstream effects thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years later, and so often politicians and policy makers take the short view of thinking what can I do early in development without realizing those things have to be sustained. So early in the development of Head Start they did stimulation for three and four and five year olds and then that was it. But the best evidence is that there needs to be continuity over time. So that means policy makers have to be willing to commit to funding things for a long period of time not just a one shot deal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, I think they need to strip out the politics from policy and really do what\u2019s in the best interest of children and not necessarily what\u2019s in the best interest of different constituencies. Kids often get caught in the middle, and that\u2019s unfortunate because it\u2019s not really in the best interest of the child. One example that would be sometimes policies about international adoption, since I\u2019m caught up in that, there are many countries that have now banned international adoption for political reasons and the only people getting hurt with this are the kids. So now the kids languish in institutions instead of getting to be adopted. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a couple of things I\u2019d like to tell policy makers. One is – listen to the science. I think often policy is based on what people think people want to hear or their personal experience, but it\u2019s not based on science, so I think policy makers need to listen to the science. Second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2537","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2538,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2537\/revisions\/2538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}