Putting Our Brains Together to Raise Healthy Children

It is no mystery that our brains direct our actions and emotions, as well as our bodies. The Promise Neighborhood initiative offers neighborhoods the opportunity to apply lessons from neuroscience research findings to promote healthy child growth and development.

Neuroscience research over decades shows that adversity – growing up under dangerous, neglectful or impoverished conditions – is bad for the brain. We see every day how this impacts neighborhoods resulting in violence, neglect, addiction and school dropout rates.

Thanks to a growing body of research, we are beginning to learn how to minimize, reverse, or better yet, prevent such damage. The brain is the focus of this approach because of its central role in thinking, deciding, and behaving.

Fostering healthy brains can turn a childhood of hardship into a childhood of promise. Offering support to children, families and schools leads to progress in turning around lives, from distressed and hopeless to well adjusted and full of hope. Here’s what the science has shown

• Introducing positive behaviors and improving living conditions can reduce or even reverse negative effects on the brain’s development
• From birth through about age 25, the brain is constantly changing and developing: such Neuroplastiscity provides the chance to connect or rewire cell connections in the brain that can improve healthier development
• Neuroplasticity at this stage occurs where learning, reasoning and emotional processing take place in the cognitive (prefrontal cortex)cognitive and emotional regulatory (limbic system) parts of the brain
• Providing early positive experiences can help children overcome the effects of stress and other deficits, and to better cope with their environment

Ready to Learn and Ready to Lead

When a child’s world is defined by such conditions, it has a widespread impact on family, friends, schools and even eventual employment and partnerships. Applying these remedies to whole neighborhoods to help improve outcomes for one child, one family, one neighborhood can lead to successes that impact many lives.

A nurturing environment improves a child’s chances for success. Coordinating neighborhood services to provide children with positive experiences can create a new generation of kids ready to learn and ready to lead.