Community experts discuss importance of childhood development
Nov. 14—SOUTHERN INDIANA — Early Living Indiana hosted a community discussion at Ivy Tech Sellersburg on Tuesday about the importance of children's earliest years.
Early Learning Indiana is gathering community leaders from Clark County and surrounding communities for the "Early Years Roadshow."
Tuesday's forum was the second of five statewide events that cover different topics such as ensuring access to supportive child care for infants and toddlers, supporting the early detection of developmental needs or disabilities for infants and toddlers, promoting essential skills for infants and toddlers through early language strategies, and strengthening families with infants and toddlers through home visiting and parent education programs.
Early Learning Indiana is facilitating these discussions to celebrate their Early Years initiative, a $50-million program that was made to support families with children from birth to 3 years old. The initiative is providing $31 million in grants to 86 organizations around the state.
"We know that the work that's happening in the brains of young children is really unparalleled," said Maureen Weber, Early Learning Indiana's president and CEO. "They're sponges. They are learning so much as their brains get that sort of essential foundation that really supports their learning much later in life."
Tne panel featured Katie Herron, director of Indiana University's Early Childhood Center and the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community; Ashley Purdue, MSW, prevention supervisor for the Indiana Department of Child Services; Dr. Chris Mescia of ALL IN Pediatrics and Jennifer Owens, director of Family Services at Blue River Services, Inc.
"In general, with toddlers and infants, we usually get questions around three topics," Mescia said. "It's sleep, nutrition and their developmental milestones."
The main issue that parents have with their child sleeping is that they are not getting rest when they should be. Mescia is also concerned about the child sleeping in a safe place.
For nutrition, parents have come to Mescia about their child being a picky eater, and, in some cases, being overweight is an issue. He said that children eat based on their growth spurts and parents have control of the food they have access to, but should also monitor how much they consume.
"When it comes to development, there are certain things that are more red flags than others," Mescia said. "The things that do a lot of reassuring about is a fair amount of gross motor milestones. The opposite is the scenario with speech... that gets our attention. The vast majority of time a parent is concerned about speech, there's something going on."
Herron gave advice as to what people at the discussion and the community can do to build on from the topics covered during the forum.
Spreading data and getting information on early childhood development is one of the best ways to build from the discussion, she said.
"We have some really good data on early childhood now that we didn't have 5 or 10 years ago," Herron said. "What data do you have in Southern Indiana? Is there a coalition, where does the data live? Is there a way to pull some of that data together to take a look at where we have gaps?"
Some examples she gave are when children start school, some of them will need an intervention. Some populations are also missed, which makes it harder to target those in need.
"Second thing I would say is starting to bring a universal design for learning approach to early detection and really anything we do in early childhood," Herron said. "The idea behind universal design for learning is that we set up the environment and the ways that we're offering information in enough diverse ways that it works for everybody."
