It’s time. No excuses.

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Here’s a contrarian view to what so many politicians want you to believe.  We must provide a social safety net for the poor.  We must find a way to educate parents – and to find a means to let them have enough time- in between their two and three shifts of (part-time work)- to spend “quality time” with their kids.   We must fund early childhood education.

Because if we don’t, those children’s chances to garner an education, to obtain skills, will be lost.  Probably forever.  And, that’s the part that the politicians and the 1% fail to consider.

Because not only have we insured (pun intended) that only the rich have had the chance to regain – or truly augment- their financial situation after the Great Recession, this period of contraction, of unemployment, probably left our children of the lower classes even more at risk.  (I am not even going to discuss- except for this brief mention- the theft of the “American Dream” as a potentiality for most Americans.)

You see, science has been teaching us a lot.  (And, many refuse to understand or agree with science, because their pre-conceived [and deadly wrong] notions disagree with the findings.) Genomics is the study of DNA- but it includes the actual genes and their pathways.  It’s sister, epigenetics, is the science that discerns the ability of the environment to turn on- or turn off- various capabilities.  It explains why certain genes are expressed- and others never seem to become activated.

Epigenetic mechanisms
Epigenetic mechanisms (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have known for a decade that stress can methylate- or demethylate a gene.  That slight change means that we react to events differently, as a result of stress.  Drs. E. Fish, D. Sharokh, R. Bagot, C. Caldji, T. Bredy, M. Szyf, and M.J. Meaney published their seminal paper, “Epigenetic Programming of Stress Responses through Variations in Maternal Care” in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2004).  An updated paper by Meaney’s group (this time with Drs. Weaver, Cervoni, Champagne, d’Alessio, Sharma, Seckl, Dymov, and Szyf) was just published in Nature, “Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior”.

Their titles explain in a nutshell how important maternal time with a child can be to proper gene expression. Those rats who were less nuzzled, less caressed by their moms had methylated gene expressions.  And, these rendered the rats far more likely to have negative stress reactions.  And, these are changed their genes- which changes can be passed on to subsequent generations.

And, while humans are far more complex, we are beginning to prove those same results in our children.  In this study in Child Development by Drs.SE Romens, J McDonald, J Svaren, and Seth Pollack found the methylation situation also exists in human children. There was an earlier publication in PLOSOne that found relationships between poverty, the brain’s hippocampus, and stress.

Given that 20% of American children are poor- and there are others that are maltreated- the rest of us have no choice but to finally address this issue- properly.  Because our children ARE the hope of this country for the future.

 

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2 thoughts on “It’s time. No excuses.”

  1. You are correct again and there is another side to this coin. These are the people that will support this country in the future. The ones that will pay taxes to run this overstuffed government and pay the income of those politicians. They are shooting their cash cow in the foot if they don’t take care of the base. At some point countries like China will stop sending money just so the boys of Washington can go to expensive restaurants and set around talking politics so that they can charge off the lunch to the cost of doing business. When that happens, this government better have a strong base with a good tax paying group of employees……..
    Chef William Chaney recently posted..Winter Squash are Here

    1. Wonderful comment, Chef William.
      Because we do need every taxpayer that we have. And, if we render it impossible for them to be as productive as possible, we- the other citizens of the US (or any other country) will lose that potential revenue contribution- or better yet, great new product that we could use.

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