Word: childhoods
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...families living in poverty in 25 states, but President Obama has said he plans to expand the benefit, extending it to every first-time poor mother in the country - about 570,000 women each year. The President's stimulus plan includes more than $3 billion in funding for early-childhood-intervention programs such as Head Start and Early Head Start. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree...
...real difference in children's lives? In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Douglas Besharov of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and a colleague argued that expanding prekindergarten programs "without demanding reforms will not help children." Other critics have also opined that funding early-childhood initiatives is just a sop to liberal interest groups...
...science supporting warm and fuzzy early-childhood interventions is sound and is only getting stronger. "There's converging evidence from neuroscience, social science and animal data," says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you want to invest societal resources where they will have the biggest benefit for all of us, clearly the evidence is there now that protecting children from the worst kinds of deprivation in their youngest years will result in more functional, capable, prosocial citizens...
...built his empire on it. His early, primal animated features mined infant emotions of fear, loss and reconciliation, and branded the Disney name on their receptive brains. On '50s TV, The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland sold young viewers not just a theme park but a sanitized ideal of childhood. Walt also sold them friends: cartoon characters you could pack your school lunch in, fall asleep with or wear on your wrist. (The marketing genius of the Mickey Mouse watch cannot be overstated...
...This has got to be part of a Disney expansion strategy. Where once the company aimed to keep its target market in perpetual childhood, now it is priming kids for the more overtly erotic signals of puberty. The Jonas Brothers concert is like a very gentle sex-education lecture given by the most adorable young teacher around, and his two brothers...