Lunch & Learn: Understanding child development through the lens of brain science, 4/16/26, 12pm

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm so glad you're here. This is going to be the best moment of your lives, I hope. I'm not setting them up for anything, am I?

Anyhow, I know we're around the 90th day of session. I know our brains are full, but this one I think is gonna spark some ideas in your head, especially the next time you're at the supermarket and you see someone sitting in that cart, pretty small, young, looking maybe a little bored in the supermarket. You're gonna think to yourself, huh, What have I learned today that might make a difference in the world just by way of interacting with that child differently? So the— today's Lunch and Learn is all about the child's brain and how we all might learn something about the science of how it evolves and how we have impact on that, whether it's through policy or in our everyday lives. And thankfully, we have some experts here to give us some background, to interact with us, to really jog our brains to think about what makes sense for policy.

So Tamara Benyosef is here. [SPEAKING NATIVE LANGUAGE] You can see her smiling. She's the executive director of the All Alaska Pediatric Partnership and has been with A2P2 for 10 years. We also have Carmen Wenger here, and she is the organization's Director of Programs and has been with A2P2 for nearly as long, so almost 10 years. She joined TAMARA in 2017 to help launch A2P2's resource navigation and care coordination program.

And that's all as part of Help Me Grow Alaska. Today they're going to guide us through their organization's mission and explore topics such as early childhood development, brain growth, the impact of learning, executive function, and mental health and well-being. I hope you are at least half as excited as I am to learn more about these topics. And so please give them a warm, warm welcome. And as you enjoy your lunch, listen and Tamar.

Thank you, Representative Galvin. That was quite the introduction, and I'm very flattered to see you all here. I'm sorry, I'll ignore the fact that you're forced to stay if you want to get food, but, um, and assume that you all want to learn why you're able to sit here and multitask eating a sandwich while listening to us talk. So, um, as Representative Galvin said, my name is Tamar, and I've been with A2P2 for a little over 10 years between Carmen and I, we've got about 20 years combined under A2P2 of working collaboratively with partners around the state to close gaps in care for children in Alaska and for their families. And we're very excited to be here today.

If you're not familiar with A2P2, we have been around for 30 years, started out as a collaborative between Alaska's major Hospitals, Tribal Health, and the Division of Public Health to basically provide a mechanism for Alaska's leaders in healthcare and specifically pediatric to work collaboratively on driving innovation and collaborations that increase access to services and care for children in Alaska. And about 10 years ago, we became officially a nonprofit and really formalized the mission of transforming systems of care and increasing equitable access to health and related services and ensuring that all children are supported to grow and reach their full potential.

Next. Oh, do I— do I have this the right thing?

Thank you.

So this slide— talks about our mission and our, our core values. These core values really guide the way that we do our work at A2P2, and not just what the work that we do is, but also our approach to doing that work. And through partnerships, which is in our name, collaboration, and really being a trusted source of information for you all as you work through through your days making decisions and creating policies that impact Alaskans and impact Alaska's English children.

Next slide. Outside.

See, I'm not very good at multitasking right now. Thanks.

Okay. This slide shows the 4 areas of our programmatic work. Not all of our work fits neatly into really pretty logos with an identity like we've got here. So these logos show some of the programs, all the programs, the official programs we have under A2P2. But the areas up on top show kind of the different ways that we work on changing the systems of care for kids in Alaska.

Our partnership— partnerships up there, that is where we host our partnership meetings, which is kind of how A2P2 started 30 years ago, is bringing community-based services and pediatric service providers together in communities around the state and providing them an opportunity to get to know each other in the community and collaborate and network And the result of that, as we've seen over 30 years, is that it does lead to smoother access to care for the children in that community when the providers know each other and understand each other's services and what programs are and aren't available. Help Me Grow Alaska is, as Representative Gallin said, one of our largest programs, the first one that we launched that provides a service to children and families. It's a resource navigation and care coordination service that's available to anyone caring for a child prenatal to 26. So really anyone in Alaska who interacts and cares for a child in some capacity can contact Help Me Grow Alaska. We have family support specialists that staff our call center and we can help folks navigate whatever it is they need to be able to raise their children, whether it's basic needs, whether it's a referral for behavioral health or early childhood supports.

Social determinant, basic needs, social determinants of health, food insecurities, housing. We can help navigate that. We do not provide the service ourselves. We do not have medical providers or behavioral health providers, but we will get the family connected. And the information that we gather from that program really helps us in our conversations with you all to be able to point at where the system has gaps and barriers, where there's strengths that we can build off on and how families are experiencing those systems of care.

We also put on a pediatric symposium every year for medical providers. It's a 2-day event in November and it is a great way for us to bring medical providers together because often children in Alaska don't experience care in one, in one community. They have to travel to Anchorage or they have to travel to Fairbanks Fairbanks or they have to travel out of state and having that collaboration is extremely helpful and also the Alaska-specific training. And then data and policy is really across— supports all our programs and is what we really enjoy sharing with you guys is what the close knowledge that we have on children. I'm going to pass the mic on to Carmen who's going to get to the part that you're really here to hear about.

Hi, I'm so excited to see so many of you here, and we're going to talk about brain science and how that supports child development today. A little closer. A little closer. Is that better? Perfect.

Okay. And we're going to play today because play is an essential part of the developing brain. Before they told me that I had to hold this microphone, and I knew that you all would be sitting here eating, we were going to be playing a little bit more, but we're going to save that for later. But we will be interacting a bit today. So we have some trivia and we have some videos and you have to listen to me talk a little bit.

So we're gonna start with some trivia.

In the first few years of life, how often or how long does it take for— how often are 1 million new neural connections formed? Your options are every second, every hour, or every day. Raise your hand to say it. A. A, B, C, D, E. B?

We got an A. We got mostly Bs. No Cs? No takers on C, huh? The answer is every second.

Surprise! So let that sink in for a second. Every second, right? Every second, a million new connections are being made in a baby's brain. Second question.

You can redeem yourselves. We got a couple chances here, guys. Do experiences in early childhood change the actual structure of a child's brain?

Yes? No? The science is like this. Hearing yes. You guys are catching on.

You guys are quick. Yes. And I want to be clear that the science is very clear. This is not a disputed question. Okay, so we're going to— now that you're hopefully feeling a little warmed up, we're going to watch a video real quick.

Um, that talks a little bit about that.

Throughout our lives, our brains play a role in everything we do. They are responsible for our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. For the choices we make, the way we treat others, how we cope with life's ups and downs, make friends, and fall in love. An emotionally healthy brain therefore helps us lead a healthy, happy life. And when you add it all up, that's what shapes our future society.

Our brains continue to develop throughout our lives but they do most of their growing when we're very young, which is why early childhood, the time from pregnancy to 5, matters so much.

During this time, they produce an astonishing 1 million new connections every second, the fastest period of brain development in our entire lives. You might think that this happens automatically, according to a set of instructions, But in fact, our brains are constantly growing and adapting in response to our interactions with the outside world. And the most important interactions we have are with the adults around us. For example, when our young brain hears an adult speaking, it starts to build the connections we need to understand what they're saying and eventually to use words of our own. And it's the same for all the skills we are developing, even the things that aren't as easy to spot.

Things like how willing we are to trust someone, or our ability to understand what someone else might be feeling. Things known as social and emotional skills. Skills which, as adults, we use on a daily basis. When we have adults who care for us, cuddle us, play with us, and show joy in us. This makes us feel safe, valued, and understood, and provides the steady emotional nourishment that our brains thrive on.

Put simply, sensitive, responsive care is the key to developing an emotionally healthy brain. On the other hand, repeated experiences that feel very stressful or threatening can encourage our brains to grow in ways that can be limiting, meaning we might find it harder to adapt to life as an Of course, with love and support, we can still overcome a difficult start in life, but the brain we develop when we're young forms the basis of the brain we have when we grow up. So early childhood really is a golden opportunity to build the foundations for a happy, healthy life.

Okay, so we have the first couple years of life. We have a lot that's going on, and we're going to kind of talk about in phases. So at the very fundamental level, there's the structural changes, the growth that happens. And you can see from this chart that, um, in those first 3 years, our brain grows from birth to age 3, we gain 60% of the physical size of our brain. So even if we're taking out those, all those neural connections, which we'll get back to in a second, 60% of our brain growth happens over the course of those first 3 years.

And then you get all the way up to 92% of your adult brain size by the age you're 5. So thinking about all of the things that happen, and that lead up to the creation of who we're gonna be, whether we're in school or as an adult. A lot of those critical foundational things happen in those early years. I forgot to mention at the beginning, throughout the presentation I'm gonna have these Alaska Service Highlights to call out what we do in the state that is our, is these kind of critical foundations, these supports to different phases of children. And how we support them here.

And so the first Alaska Service highlight I want to call out is the Infant Learning Program. So thinking just about that 60% of our brain that we get from birth to age 3, our Infant Learning Program is something that's set up to support families who are in that birth to 3 age range for early intervention. If something's maybe not developing the way it should, or if they need extra support, that program is specifically there in that critical age range when the majority of our brain growth happens.

So it's not just physical size though. Some of you, if you got the papers out on the desk when you walked in, there was a little quiz. You don't have to tell me what your answers are, but it looked at the neural development of kids and the connections that are made. And so we— our brains grow, obviously in physical size. You've all seen babies and you've seen adults and we're not actually the same size, but the connections that are made in your brain are changing as well.

And that there's that really rapid period of growth in early childhood. We actually have more connections when we're young than we do as an adult. The common analogy for this is a fruit tree and pruning. So we create all these connections. The brain is going through a rapid period of growth and it's trying to make sense of the world.

And then as we go through experiences, what is common to us and what we're learning lays down those paths that will be the foundation of the brain for the rest of our life. And we prune away those paths that are not used. So we kind of have this broad expanse of what's possible, and then we start pruning away the ones that are not used. In those— starting in those first early years of mid-childhood.

And this gets back to that second question we had around can our physical— or can our experiences change the physical structure of our brain? And so the concept of you feed the thing you want— you feed the thing you use is those connections that we don't use get pruned away, but the connections we do use get stronger. And the good news is we do have the opportunity to change this throughout our life, but in early childhood it's the time that we have the most ability to change it. I have another Alaska service highlight here is Head Start. Many of the communities that you're representing have Head Start programs, and this is a comprehensive program that again targets this age range that provides comprehensive services to families.

They support them from an early childhood education standpoint, but they're also working with the families to get them connected to support to offer that education about how to interact with their children well and to grow those healthy, healthy kids.

And this is the kind of to round out the brain architecture piece, that early, those early years when their— the brain is growing so fast, it's also very plastic. It's very malleable. So our brain plasticity, we have the ability to change it, is really high when we're young and it goes down over time. Have you ever noticed that? Like, it's a lot harder for me to learn something than it is for my 7 and 9-year-old.

But harder every year, it seems. And what— how much intervention it takes to change it goes up over time. There's an inverse relationship. So when we think about getting a— you know, there's a lot of phrases around getting a good start in life. You can also think about how much harder it's going to be to change later.

So if we set down that strong foundation, we get the neural pathways the way to set a strong start, we're able to adjust those pathways early when the plasticity is high, and it costs a lot more and it's a lot harder to adjust them later if you're not liking 3rd grade reading scores or your graduation rate isn't what you want it to be. Okay, another trivia question. I got pushback on this, so there may or may not be more than one right answer. Peekaboo fundamentally is A, A, something to keep parents entertained when they don't know what else to do with their baby. B, critically important for how children learn.

Or C, really annoying and kids should get more respect. A and B. No Cs? Okay. Okay.

B is definitely true. I will leave it up to you if A or C is also true. But— We'll go into the video in a second, but the reason for this is something called serve and return, and we're gonna watch a video on that, and this is when I was gonna throw the balls at you, but I will not do that because you're eating, but the concept of, oh yeah? Here you go. Sweet, grab a prize too.

Of that interaction and how we, oh, you're gonna throw it back? Yeah. Oh, that's me! Um, serve and return. So we'll watch a short video and then we'll talk a little bit more about it.

Good prize.

The key to forming strong brain architecture is what's known as serve and return interaction with adults. In this developmental game, new neural connections form in the brain as young children instinctively serve through babbling, facial expressions, and gestures. And adults return the serve, responding in a very directed, meaningful way. It starts very early in life when a baby coos and the adult interacts and directs the baby's attention to a face or hand. This interaction forms the foundation of brain architecture upon which all future development will be built.

It helps create neural connections between all the different areas of the brain, building the emotional and cognitive skills children need in life. For example, here's how it works for literacy and language skills. When the baby sees an object, the adult says its name. This makes connections in the baby's brain between particular sounds and their corresponding objects. Later, adults show young children that those objects and sounds can also be represented by marks on a page.

With continued support from adults, children then learn how to decipher writing and eventually to write themselves. Each stage builds on what came before. Ensuring that children have adult caregivers who consistently engage in serve and return interaction, beginning in infancy, builds a foundation in the brain for all the learning, behavior, and health that follow.

So the very basics of this interaction is the serve and return. This idea that when we're interacting with a child, they do something. They may not be old enough to talk or say, "Hey, Mom," or, "Hey, Dad," but they do something. They coo, they make a noise, they move. And we respond to them is the fundamental part of how they start forming some of those connections, and it's going to lead into some of the brain development we talk about in a second, but there's a lot of ways we do this, and we're pretty well adapted to do some of this automatically.

Have you ever noticed whether it's you or somebody else's, when you see a baby, the tone and the pitch of your voice changes? Oh, it's so cute, right? But I wouldn't walk up to somebody else and be like, hi, Tamar, you're so cute. The way we interact with them, it's how we respond and we show them that we understand them and that they're safe and that we can keep building on their understanding of the world. This picture, which is way too small for you to read from where you're sitting, is an example of all of those types of things.

The way we do serve and return interactions, the way we talk with children that build on each other to lay those foundations of the baby's understanding of the world. And it starts at just that, a few months old, but all of that builds up to the things we talk about around pre-literacy, early literacy, and ultimately create an environment for that child to have the brain structure to be able to learn the way we want them to in school. And so my Alaska service highlight here is Parents as Teachers, which is just one model of several we have in the state for home visiting programs. And what this does is it's a, a program of these incredibly trained professionals who work with parents in their own home environment to help them understand some of these things and to also help meet their needs. So they can be that trusted adult for that child and help nurture those interactions and be the parent that can create brain architecture that supports learning throughout that child's life.

And it really helps parents both have somebody trusted to go to, so they can be the trusted person for their child, and supports other needs that they might need based on that family's own existence, own circumstance. There's another video I didn't have time to put in, but I have the link if you do want to watch it later, talking about the social brain and how we respond differently to real live people versus things like screens. A really interesting case study around kids that were given access to play sessions with a Mandarin speaker versus the exact same room, exact same dosage or amount of time time with a DVD and what the brain science shows around the intervention group who their brains were exactly the same as a child from a native speaker of that language versus the DVD intervention group that had functionally learned nothing.

Oh, good, more trivia. Okay. So children begin learning the foundational concepts to support school and career success at what age? A. Nice, you guys are so great.

That's right, 6 to 12 months, A. However, all of these are really important age ranges, so I just want to highlight that. So yes, executive function, which is the next concept we're going to talk about, which is building on our brain architecture and our serve and return skills, starts at 6 to 12 months. However, Ages 3 to 5 is our fastest period of growth. That's the time our brain is expanding the largest.

If you picked up one of our quizzes outside, that's a clue for your answers there. But 25 years is how long that development takes. And so it's a very long process, but our opportunity to intervene and the times when we can make the biggest trajectory change is those first couple years.

Okay, this is the last video, but it's a good one.

Science tells us that brains, minds, are built, not born. And at the center of this dynamic architecture are a set of skills called executive function and self-regulation. Children's self-regulation and executive function are key ingredients in their lifetime performance. It's not just about learning language or learning numbers or learning colors. We have to be able to work effectively with others, with distractions, with multiple demands.

These actually are skills that contribute to the productivity of the American workforce. Don't do it! Jesse, look at your shapes. What should you have done next? Educators, I think, are looking for just this sort of thing, and when we describe what we mean by executive function, they say, "Yes, that's it.

That's exactly, you know, the problem. These kids, they can tell me these rules, but they can't actually and how we use them. What's this? A toolbox. A toolbox.

What is executive function? Look. Safety goggles. Safety goggles. Probably the best way to think about it is sort of like an air traffic control system in the brain.

Just like an air traffic control system has to manage lots of airplanes going on lots of runways, and really exquisite timing and so on. A child has to manage a lot of information and avoid distractions.

We really think of it as involving working memory and inhibitory control and mental flexibility.

Take a situation where a child is having to take turns.

So first of all, the child has to have inhibitory control. The child has to be able to stop whatever he or she is doing and let the other child take a turn. "Cute." But when it's your turn again, you also have to remember what it is you're supposed to be doing. "Oh, you have to stop." So that pulls on working memory. If the children who are taking the turns after you do something unpredictable, you have to be able to adjust what you're going to do next.

And that requires mental flexibility. That was hard, huh? Children who are struggling with these capacities often look like children who just aren't paying attention or children who are deliberately not controlling themselves. Oh! No!

Simone, nice job! If you don't have self-regulation, you act out, and the teacher And so then you miss part of the learning that's going on, and then you are more upset because you're behind, and so you act out, and so you get this downward spiral. How does executive function develop? 6, 7, 7, And plus 4. In little children, and even, you know, in the infant and toddler years, you begin to see the roots of executive functioning skills.

What's going on in our brains is unbelievably intricate and complicated.

The prefrontal cortex, or the front third of the brain, is important for executive function. But it's more than just prefrontal cortex. This region doesn't act alone. It's involved in controlling your behavior through its interactions with all other parts of the brain. The brain goes from a situation where you've got nearest neurons communicating very strongly with each other and ignoring the rest of the brain to these widespread networks that are connecting these different areas.

Executive function changes over the life course. It improves radically over the in the first few years. I got a match, Brian. It continues to improve throughout adolescence. It's not until early adulthood that you have the adult-type networks that are very strongly activated that connect different brain regions together.

Just take notes. Also, we believe that executive functions can be trained. It's just like going to the gym. So the more you practice in these areas, the stronger the capacity is likely to become because you're helping to strengthen those neural connections. Aha!

You're at 24. Slowly but surely, you're going to be able to step back, and that child's going to go into the world with these skills where they can get along with other people, change rules, and they can be flexible, and they can accomplish new things, and they're unafraid. I got bit by my dog in my arm. Oh, dear. If we don't learn these skills during the childhood and adolescent years when they're coming online, We are really ill-equipped as an adult to hold a job, to maintain a marriage, to raise children, to get along with each other, to basically be part of a civil society.

You're okay.

Okay, so with executive function, like they said, this is, um, really where we're going, right? We have this really great opportunity in these early years of rapid brain growth. We know how we interact with kids and the experiences they have with serve and return and other things form that core foundation. And what we're going for is these executive function skills. And, um, my Alaska service highlight here is early childhood education.

This is one environment when we have high-quality early childhood education for kids to to get the experience like those kids in the video were having around getting to try that out with their peers. And executive function skills are kind of some of those basic building blocks of the things we use every day, but it's how we learn to navigate the world in a way that we can be productive in school and in work. Like this morning, you guys all came to work today. Nice job. But to do that, you had to, to get up and get dressed and to be on work on time, you had to set an alarm last night, right?

And so you had to think ahead and you had to make a plan for that and you had to do it. And most of you did that without thinking about it because it's so ingrained in us and we've developed those executive function skills because of using these building blocks over time, right? But those are the skills that our teachers expect of our students and our employers expect of our workforce. And the key to developing that starts in our earliest years.

So, um, I think we've already covered most of this, but, um, all of this leads up— before we're— before we held the job, we're school, right? I hear a lot in this building about, um, school readiness, about 3rd grade reading skill or reading scores, graduation rates, um, and our, our key to laying a path and making a change to those, um, is making sure we have a strong foundation for for our kids in their earliest years because of that progression through those opportunities we have in that, that plastic brain we have at, in that early childhood. A few, some data that we have from right here in Alaska. This comes from the Division of Public Health, the Section of Women's, Children's, Family Health. They do some amazing data work that really shows us where our kids are at here.

We don't have time for as much as I would love to talk, but I know Dr. Jared Parrish has talked with groups here recently as well. So the PRAMS study, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Survey, is something that looks at, looks back at what experiences might have happened even before birth. So, and in that first year of life. And so this directly relates to how kid— how mothers answered on the PRAMS survey relating to household challenges and what those look like for the Alaska Developmental Profile, the 3rd grade reading proficiency, and their attendance. And so these things, there's a direct line between the experiences our kids have even before birth and in those early years and those assessments that we see.

So the last, the service highlight here is Help Me Grow Alaska. It's a service that is under ATPDUT. Tamar talked about it earlier, and it's something that can connect families with services and support that they need. So if they are encountering some of those challenges even before birth or as they move through that childhood system, that we can get them connected to what might be needed for that specific family.

And I'm just gonna highlight this really briefly.

The concept of infant early childhood mental health is something that's being talked about more and more, which is fantastic. It's also the concept that kind of encompasses a lot of what we're talking about here. It is the foundation for kind of healthy mental health throughout life. However, it's not the same as like behavioral health in other contexts. The concept of creating those strong supported relationships and the ability to have a trusted adult where you can do serve and return, the executive function skills that manage behavior in early years, these are all the concepts that are the basis for infant early childhood mental health.

And so when we're promoting that at this age, it's how we can infuse these concepts and these skills in a way that creates the platform for healthy development and hopefully will avoid more costly interventions later. And my last Alaska Service highlight is a new program called Growing Minds, which offers consultation services for providers when they need help and support with a child, like the one in the video that was hitting the, hitting the other kid on the head. If they need help in coaching a child through that, we now have a service line that providers can call for free to get support so they can navigate those. Instead of, instead of potentially putting somebody in timeout or expelling them from a program, they can get the coaching on how to navigate them through that and keep it being positive. All right.

So we just threw a lot of information at you guys. No, no, I'm good. You guys good with me here? That way I don't have to hold my notes and multitask. So just kind of wrapping this up and what it means for you all, we want to leave some time for question.

Child well-being is more than just the absence of negative experiences or adversity, right? It's the presence of deliberate support. That really build that infrastructure. And so in terms of thinking about policy, we think about what are these— when we come to you all talking about early childhood programs, whether it's childcare or parents as teachers or Head Start or, you know, other types of home visiting, some of those highlights that Carmen talked about, it's not about the individual programs. It's about ensuring that these supports are in place in Alaska wherever it is that families want them.

So you can homeschool, you can keep your kid at home. It's how do we ensure that the families are supported to be able to work with their kids, talk to their kids, read books with their kids, do those— interact with them, play peekaboo, those things that really build that infrastructure and executive function. And, uh, So we made the scientific case. I'm sure you all have seen this, this graph from American economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman, investing early for high returns. This is the financial case, right?

If we can provide the supports early on, then we don't have to pay as much later later on when it's harder to train and harder to correct and course correct. I'm going to kind of go through these quickly. Oops.

Okay. There we go. So, we— I'll just say in one sentence, we have a responsibility to make policies more effective for kids, to make sure families can access them, that we're taking into account the barriers that exist for families, that the barriers may look different in one community from another community, and that programs might work differently from one community to another. So just understanding, listening to families, co-designing these policies with families and, and with the organizations that that serve the families is really kind of our best and most effective approach to not, not creating policies that put more barriers in place for kids. And I think that is my last slide.

Okay, so now we can take some questions. First of all, can we please thank them for all the information? I'm going to start with a question. Sure.

And then I'll take the other mic and run it around if anyone else has questions. But for me, it's how do we help our constituents have access? Is there an easy way that we can reach out to you when we know that a family is in trouble and needs to have access to X, Y, or Z?

Go for it. Oh, I was just gonna— 100%. The next slide actually has that. So one of the— I, um, Help Me Grow Alaska is one of the programs under, um, ATP2, and that's primarily what it's there for. It's meant to be the connection point of getting families to the services and support they need.

So it's not a direct service, it's that navigation point of even if families can call and it's the idea of doing the research for them, doing that work for them, because sometimes it's just overwhelming to all of the logistics, whether you're in a rural community and don't know where to start on access accessing telemedicine while you're on a waitlist to get into a local service, or if you're in a community on the road system and don't know how to navigate insurance, who takes your insurance, or who might be able to provide clinical services in your own language. That's the, the work that the family support specialists at Help Me Grow do. There's one centralized place for that option. When can they call? What time?

Um, the call center is open 8 AM to 5 PM, but you can also leave messages or send, um, uh, put a request in through the website at any time. It's a pretty short form on the website. We have one for families and one for providers. So, um, if you want to refer a family, ideally they know that you've referred them to us, so when we contact them, they're familiar. But they can also refer themselves, and it's a very, very few questions, pretty easy short form to fill out, and And like Carmen said, we respond fairly quickly.

Any other questions? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Just going back to your study you referenced on the Heckman case, do you have like a dollar amount? I know a couple of years ago I think the study was is that for every dollar you put in, you earned back $3 or— $5, whatever it was. And I think that was one of the studies, but there were other studies that followed up on it that further supported that. And so when we are looking at, you know, putting money into early childhood, the return on the benefit and what that is, and if you could speak to that.

Yeah, I believe for the Heckman, I think it's $7, and I'll defer to— so I think Lower? Oh, $7, yeah, I believe it's $7. And again, like, right, it'll depend on what's included in the study, what they're looking at for those costs. It could be more, could be less depending on what those costs are looking at. I would say we have some great information in Alaska on, the Alaska Children's Trust has the children's budget that talks about just investments over time, but looking at some of the ACEs information, we have the economics of ACEs in Alaska, and we can, we can share some links through Representative Galvin to talk about, you know, some of those cost savings that come from prevention.

But if you think about how much we spend on Medicaid and, and correction, you know, facilities and DOJ and really just, you know, public safety in general, homelessness The savings are huge if we can get more people ready for school and the workforce later on. I, I will share one data point because I thought it was fascinating. In the ILP presentation on that particular program, for example, when a child receives services between the ages of 1 and 3, they are far more likely to then not need any of the special services in K-12, and they shared that the approximate cost savings for that alone, if they were to be getting those services, is $227,000 on average. That's just because of all the different interventions that are needed later on, whether it's hearing or behavioral or anything else. So I thought that was a really fascinating data point and worthy of mentioning.

Any other questions? One more. Alright. I was wondering if you guys could kind of detail the term iPad kids, where it came from and what challenges there are with raising neonatals and infants in an increasingly digital world.

It should be easy to cover in a minute and a half. I can't speak to the origin of the term specifically, but kind of generationally, I think, I mean, we are in an ever-increasingly online society in a lot of different ways. We have a lot of societal structures that push us to need to interact with screens more and more. Think about your own daily life, what it is now and what it was 10 years ago. So I'm trying to think about what will get you the best answer in the shortest amount of time.

So the, there's from the brain science side of how kids, their brain functions, especially when they're younger, when they're looking at screens is very different, how they absorb information, what their brains do with it, how they process it is very different. And it can, and they've shown this a lot of different ways. There is a video, I think we have to clean up, but I will show you the video if you want of this— the, the language study was showing. But they also— it, um, there's other studies around even older kids obviously who are reading, but the way we process and store information if you read something on a screen versus reading it on paper is very different. And so screens are used in a lot of different capacities, especially with young children.

And that it's hard to generalize because it's so broad, but the exposure to screens at young ages, especially in high doses, what it does is it takes away those interactions that we're supposed to be having. And so it's not— there's one argument for the screen itself, but the biggest argument is what's being replaced by it. And so what is needed for that structure and those appropriate neural connections connections to be created in those really important early years is very much based in the social interactions, and it's laying it down. Um, the— we talked about serve and return. There's a number of different components in addition to that, but, um, my brain is wired that when I, I need something from you or I gesture to you, that I'm expecting a response.

And that's not how screens are, even if like I push a button and it changes, our brains don't interpret it the same way. We're not learning about social cues. We're not able to see eyes and understand what eyes do. And that's true across cultures, right? It's not whether my culture makes eye contact or not.

It's about how we interact with other human beings and all the things we learn from that. And so it kind of structurally changes how the brain develops if the human interactions is replaced placed by a screen. I don't know if that got towards your question.

And this, if I may, this is more of a point of information as a first grade teacher and a teacher for many years. One thing we had, one study I read was that when students come into first grade or kindergarten, they're— they have about 20— they used to have, the number was about 25,000 words. That number of words that we are finding today has been reduced to more like 12,000. And so the impact of that going into then kindergarten, where we're expecting them to know the sounds and hear the sounds and say the words, has significantly decreased that ability to read. So we are looking at proficiency rates, but we really also need to be looking at, um, are the number of words children are able to, to know as an early learner.

So I just— that piece is so significant. Thank you. And I will talk about this all day, so I would be happy to keep the conversation going, um, but we are being told that we need to cleanup. So, um, happy to keep talking, um, while we clean up and out in the hallway, but really appreciate you all coming. Um, this is really important.

I'm happy to also follow up with either any of the information we discussed or if you have questions. Um, I do have one. I just want one, one small thing to add, um, because the, like, with regard to media, right, and, and how children are growing up. And, and the idea is not like, right, obviously we want kids less on screens and we want less of their education and time spent learning from screens. We also want to be careful not to just eliminate that from— as an option for parents if we're not putting something else in its place.

And sometimes a parent might— it's the difference between the child being completely unsupervised because of what's going on in the house and the child at least being in one place safely watching a screen. So not to put that kind of guilt on parents, but yes, to educate of what are alternatives that they can do and how do we support them when there is a crisis, when there is that stress going on and maybe that screen is their only affordable option. And so, yeah, just wanted to make that last point. But yes, ideally human interactions are best. Great.

Well, again, thank you to all of you. Thank you, thank you for being here. They will be in the hallway if you have more questions. Please say thank you again. I'm so grateful for them coming.

And we have prizes for you guys. And you have an opportunity every day to interact with a little one. I know you do. So just keep that all in mind, everyone. Thank you.