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I have finally figured out why people think we’re wiser when we get older. It’s only because we’ve been through it all before!

My first political memory is of President Kennedy’s first 100 days. As a high school student it seemed like our country was all of a sudden dealing with all kinds of problems we didn’t even know we had. I remember the direct and local support Johnson’s War on Poverty gave to my community-organizing efforts—including funding for summer jobs for every teenager who needed work.  My (older) husband says one of the reasons Wall St. didn’t anticipate our current economic woes is because most of the traders are too young to remember the Great Depression.

I remember when Los Angeles was covered in smog, before the Clean Air Act and Earth Day were accepted facts of life. I remember when kids didn’t have “adult-onset” diabetes and food wasn’t bulked up with high-fructose corn syrup. I remember when it was news that what happened to babies made a difference to their futures.

Now we have a new frontier in the fight to preserve the health of our planet: last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its official position that greenhouse gases represent a significant threat to public health and welfare, which authorizes action (yet to be determined) to regulate greenhouse gases. There's no shortage of controversy about what that action should be, but all sides seem to agree that Congressional action is preferable to the EPA acting alone. As a result, debate over a cap and trade system to limit carbon emissions is heating up in Congress.

EPA rulings are generally outside the scope of CFK's focus. Not so this one—the ruling on greenhouse gases is important for child advocates to watch not only because air quality affects children (of course), but because the decisions on cap and trade will have a profound impact on the federal budget, and may be tied to funding for health care reform. CFK will track developments.

And new research is telling us how early experiences have lasting and often catastrophic consequences into adolescence and adulthood, especially if good parenting isn’t available to mitigate the effects of severe poverty.

When I was studying child development in the 1970s, this knowledge seemed commonplace. Theodore Lidz and Sally Provence toured orphanages in the 1960s to find out why the babies were getting sick and even dying. They discovered that it wasn’t lack of physical care, but lack of individual attention and emotional care that was making the babies unresponsive. Hence the shift from institutional care to family foster care for young children.

Now we can actually see the physical consequences of neglect in the brains of babies, like those raised in understaffed orphanages in Romania (see the photos in the Center for the Developing Child article, cited here in the CFK Update).

We know that poverty is bad for kids. So the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report that the after-tax income gap between the top 1 percent and the middle and bottom fifths has tripled in the last three decades, to its widest gulf on record, is bad news especially for children.

Yet in the face of this , Timothy Smeeding, expert on child poverty rates in the industrialized world, sees shifting priorities that could mean a sea change in our societal commitment to providing a strong safety net for our children. To Smeeding, the new administration seems like a breath of fresh air, like another administration 50 years ago.

Is it too much to ask, Is this a new day for those of us—young people and the not-so-young alike—who advocate for our nation's children and youth?

Amid all the news and developments, let’s not forget the importance of play! It is through the hard work of imaginative and skill-building play that young children learn new skills and prepare for academic learning. See the article about the importance of kindergarten play here in the Update.

Find these resources and more in the April 23 CFK Update.

- Jan Richter, CFK Update editor emeritus | jan@connectforkids.org