Lifting Families and Communities in Tulsa

In November, the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) began the next phase of a joint-campaign with Too Small to Fail called “Talking is Teaching: Talk, Read, Sing,” in the Tulsa community. Our campaign highlights the impor...

National leaders appeal to parents to #ClosetheWordGap

Q&A with Deborah Stipek: Building Early Math Skills

What is “early math”?  Parents should think of math as a continuum that begins very early in life and continues through school. You can begin teaching math concepts in infancy, and adjust how you teach your child dependi...

Start Ahead and Stay Ahead

If you’re a parent, or you’re the one who takes care of a young child, you are doing an extra job every day. You may not even realize it, but you’re already doing it:  You are teaching. People usually think of teac...

Closing the vocabulary gap one word at a time

Families that simply talk, read or sing to their babies and toddlers every day will expose them to millions of words by the time they reach school age.

Toxic Stress

Chances are, you know someone whose child has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Perhaps your own child has received this diagnosis. In many cases, it’s a legitimate issue, and can require medication...

Q&A with Sandra Gutierrez

Describe this model you helped develop— We created Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors because demographics are shifting, the Latino population is booming, and there just wasn’t anything like it.  Outcomes for this population...

It Pays to Play

There’s something key about early childhood development that we often overlook:  the importance of playing and talking.  This applies to families of every background, in my experience.  It’s essential for paren...

Fostering Lifelong Health Begins at Birth

What happens in the first few years of life can shape a lifetime.  For some time we have known about this in relation to education: School readiness predicts school performance, which predicts educational attainment. And now we have...

Give Them Math

“Sweetie, let’s move away from that toy cash register. Mommy thinks you’d have more fun playing dress-up!” Conversations like this abound in videotapes of mothers steering their preschool-age children away from ac...

Children’s earliest years linked to future success

After graduate school, I made a decision to become a special-education teacher. I can still see myself walking into my first classroom, a little terrified, but excited about what was behind that door. There is something magical about wat...

Child’s first 5 years hold key to success

As a surgeon, I understand the exigency of a window of opportunity. In cardiac transplant, procurement of a donor heart starts a strict four-hour window until that heart needs to be beating in the chest of the accepting patient — a...

Closing the "Word Gap"

Nourishing a child’s mind in the first five years of life is as essential as feeding her body. New scientific research confirms that what happens to children’s brains in their earliest years shapes the adults they become, the...