Addressing our greatest social ills starts with giving every child the opportunity for a healthy, productive life.
Not all childhoods are created equal. In Tennessee, over 20 percent of children live in poverty, and 1 in 20 are the victim of a reported case of child abuse every year. Unsurprisingly, it’s those children who are most at risk for ending up in prison or battling drug addiction or mental health issues as adults.
Tennessee taxpayers spend well over $1 billion a year on incarceration costs and close to another half billion on programs to address mental health and substance abuse issues across our state.
This is equal parts an economic issue and a social justice issue. And it’s completely within our power to fix. In fact, most of our chronic social challenges can be addressed by giving children healthy, nurturing childhoods. Here’s why:
When children experience prolonged and severe stress, the stress hormones disrupt normal brain development. We know this from a growing volume of research on Adverse Childhood Experiences, also known as ACEs.
ACEs include things like food insecurity, homelessness, family violence, and other forms of trauma. The more stress children experience from ACEs, the higher their risks become for a number of health and socioeconomic challenges later in life, including drug addiction and mental health disorders. Childhood trauma also brings a host of tangible and intangible lifetime costs for individuals and our communities, including dependency on public programs, lost wages, chronic illness, and a reduced quality of life overall.
It doesn’t stop there.
When children who experience trauma grow up and become parents, their children are likely to repeat these same experiences, creating a cycle of hardship that gets passed down from one generation to the next. Communities that lack supportive resources feed into this cycle as well. Impoverished neighborhoods lacking employment opportunities, quality schools, and adequate healthcare, inevitably lead to higher rates of childhood trauma. This is how the effects of racial and economic disparities last through multiple generations.
But cycles of trauma can be broken, and the impacts of ACEs can be mitigated. It takes investments in upstream public policies and programs that are proven to work, and we know what those are:
First, we must expand access to evidence-based home visiting and parenting education programs. Working with vulnerable families directly in the home is the most effective way to build foundations for healthy childhoods.
Second, we need policies that increase family economic security. Empowering families to meet their basic needs of food and shelter is essential for creating stable, healthy households for children.
Third, we need to expand access to high-quality early childhood programs. Not only are these beneficial for the healthy development of children, having supportive childhood programming also reduces parental stress and maternal depression, which are both risk factors for child abuse and neglect.
Fourth, we need to expand access to Medicaid in Tennessee. When parents can’t afford to keep themselves or their children healthy, the ripple effect impacts every other facet of their lives.
These are the four levers of change that we should all be able to get behind, and these are the issues that Nurture the Next will be advocating for over the next year.
The divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” in our society is not just a difference of material resources, it’s a difference of children having and not having the opportunity for lifelong wellbeing and economic self-sufficiency. If we’re going to live up to America’s promise of opportunity — moreover, if we care about the prosperity and strength of our own state — we must invest in the healthy development of our children.