“Obesity during childhood and adolescence is associated with a wide range of illnesses, negative social consequences, and poor academic performance,” the American Journal of Preventive Medicine said.
Kathryn Torla Photo.
Avery Santos
The national obesity rate among ages 2 to 19 rose from 19.3% in 2019 to 22.4% in 2020, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The national average for youths who are morbidly obese (those who are 100 pounds over their recommended weight) is 6.1%. These averages, according to the preventive medicine journal, will only increase at an accelerating rate, if nothing substantial is done.
According to a Harvard University study, consuming healthier foods and drinks, limiting unhealthy foods, exercising and limiting “sit time” should begin to lower obesity rates. Schools promoting healthier lifestyles and diets among their students could lower the obesity rate among school youth, the study said.
Connecticut is ranked 26th in the U.S. for the highest obesity rate among youth. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Connecticut’s childhood obesity rate is expected to continue rising.
For some young people, obesity can translate into low self-esteem.
“I didn’t like myself anymore,” Neema Jackson, a 16-year-old Hamden resident, said. “It was so noticeable, and I just didn’t ever like the way I looked.”
Jackson had been overweight from the age of 12 to 15. She began to lose weight and has begun to like herself again.
“My brother was also starting to lose weight, so he started to put me on a calorie diet, and I started to go to the gym,” Jackson said.
The preventive medicine journal reports that by the year 2030, 51% of the national child and adult population will be obese or severely obese. Reducing these estimates to levels seen in 2010 would save $549.5 billion in medical expenses, the journal said. Since youths who are severely obese have a higher risk of premature deaths, it could also save lives.
“Childhood and adolescents with obesity have a higher likelihood of remaining obese long term, which is termed entrenched obesity, elevating the risk of chronic disease and mortality,” the journal said.
Obesity is classified as an epidemic in the U.S. by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and rates are rising for children and adults. If nothing is done to mitigate the growth of this chronic disease, then billions of dollars will be spent on health care and millions of children will be at a higher risk of dying young.
Avery Santos is a student at Middletown High School.
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The state will direct most of its efforts — and most of $30 million in federal money — toward its cities, whose children have borne the brunt of this epidemic. In announcing the allocation recently, Gov. Ned Lamont pointed to lead’s “catastrophic” effects on children’s health and development, noting that lead poisoning is “a problem that impacts most deeply minority and disadvantaged communities of our state.”
Nearly half of the 1,024 children reported as lead poisoned in 2020 lived in New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford, or other cities, according to state Department of Public Health numbers.
DPH Photo.
“The money is necessary to address a problem that is a wrong of the past,” said Manisha Juthani, MD, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health. “We need to do better in the state of Connecticut.”
The more enduring thrust of the state’s new actions, however, is the strengthening of its outdated lead laws, starting in 2023. The changes will increase early interventions by:
• Gradually lowering the blood lead levels that trigger parental notifications.
• Lowering the blood lead counts requiring home inspections.
• Requiring more frequent testing of children who live in areas where lead exposure is more common.
Under current law, parental notifications aren’t required unless a child’s blood lead level is 5 micrograms per deciliter or higher. Starting Jan. 1, 2023, the trigger for parental notifications will be 3.5 micrograms, the standard adopted by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If the state had used the CDC’s new measurement of 3.5 micrograms in 2020, the number of Connecticut children considered lead poisoned would triple to 3,000.
More significantly, perhaps, is that by Jan. 1, 2025, investigations into where and how a child has been poisoned will drop from the current trigger of 20 micrograms per deciliter to 5 micrograms per deciliter.
‘It’s A Start’
The $30 million for lead poisoning relief is from the state’s share of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Biden administration’s COVID-19-relief legislation.
Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani, MD, said the funds will be spent largely on remediating housing found to be the source of a child’s poisoning.
Abating a single home or apartment can cost between $12,000 and $15,000, Juthani said, adding that the ARPA money will remediate more than 1,500 housing units.
“It’s a start,” she said. “This may not remove the problem altogether, but the hope is that we can make a … dent.”
“We’re going to continue to explore funding opportunities that may be federal, that may be with other partners,” Juthani said. “This is always going to be an ongoing priority.”
DPH Photo
Lori Mathieu, DPH public health section chief, discusses the state’s lead abatement plans with Commissioner Juthani.
The federal government approved a bipartisan infrastructure measure in 2021, allocating $3 billion over the next five years to cover the costs of replacing lead-lined water pipes throughout the country.
Connecticut and the other states are conducting inventories to identify pipes that need to be replaced. “Right now, we have about 18,000 on a list of possible lead service lines,” said Lori Mathieu, DPH public health section chief.
Leaded water pipes cause about 20% of all lead poisoning cases in the state; nearly every other case is linked to leaded paint.
Lead Paint In Housing
Until it was banned in 1978, for more than a half-century, lead was added to house paint to boost its durability. Even painted over, it remains on the walls of older apartment buildings and homes. As the paint inevitably deteriorates, leaded chips and paint dust can be ingested by crawling babies and toddlers who, during this peak period of brain development, typically explore their new worlds using hand-to-mouth activities.
Once in the bloodstream, the heavy metal can cause permanent cognitive problems, including a measurable loss in IQ points, hearing loss, developmental delays, learning disabilities and hyperactivity.
For years, Connecticut law lagged behind the scientific findings that ever-smaller amounts of lead can cause irreversible harm to young children.
In testimony before the Public Health Committee in March, doctor after doctor described the dire and discriminatory landscape of lead poisoning.
“As a pediatrician who cares for children with lead toxicity, I have seen firsthand the devastating and long-term health effects that lead poisoning has on the physical and mental health of young children, in particular those under the age of 6.”
— Erin Nozetz, MD, chair of the New Haven Lead Task Force
“Right now, in Connecticut,” Nozetz said, “the risk of a child being poisoned and the response to that poisoning depends on the town that the child lives in. We also know that children from underrepresented minority populations are disproportionately affected by lead toxicity. I don’t know about you, but this infuriates me.”
Waterbury’s Efforts
Connecticut cities have some of the oldest housing in the country. Larger cities may each have well over 10,000 housing units built before lead paint was outlawed.
Waterbury has more than 14,500 such units, and the city consistently has some of the highest numbers of lead-poisoned children in the state, state DPH reports show.
The Brass City reported 81 lead-poisoned children under 6 in 2020, which is certainly an undercount because of the pandemic, said Public Health Director Aisling McGuckin. In 2018, the year before COVID-19 hit, Waterbury reported twice as many lead-poisoned children.
“Waterbury is predominantly a renter city,” McGuckin said. Healthy Homes, the federal program created to eliminate housing-related environmental hazards, has done a lot of work in the city, she said. But much work remains, as well as challenges, she said.
“Landlords can be hard to contact” if an apartment unit or home needs lead remediation, McGuckin said, so “families don’t have a lot of control.”
And there are the logistics involved in the numbers of children and families needing help.
In testimony urging passage of the lead legislation, McGuckin wrote, “Currently in Waterbury, we have two staff managing the lead case management work. In FY 2021, we had over 1,000 cases that under the proposed blood lead level limits would have provoked an investigation and follow-up.”
A Modernized System
New Haven was embroiled in a class-action lawsuit for over two years after the city quietly changed its criteria for investigating lead-poisoned children. Two top health officials, including the department’s director, left. Last summer, a state judge agreed with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which had brought the lawsuit, that New Haven was in the wrong.
When the new mayor, Justin Elicker, hired Bridgeport’s public health director to fix the embattled health department, Maritza Bond said she would involve a broad spectrum of the community in her efforts, including lawyers from New Haven Legal Assistance.
“We’re in an excellent position,” Bond said. “We’ve modernized systems. We have a lead dashboard. We’re tracking cases, updating them daily.” The department’s website contains maps highlighting areas with high numbers of lead cases.
The lead program is almost fully staffed. “In two years, we’ve gone from two inspectors to five, and we’re hiring for a sixth,” said Bond, who is running for secretary of the state.
And New Haven is inspecting the homes of lead-poisoned children whose blood lead levels are 5 micrograms per deciliter or higher. The state won’t require that until 2024.
To view the 2018 and 2019 childhood lead reports go here.
Scroll below to read the 2020 childhood lead poisoning report.
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Open in new tab “She came and hugged me,” Carolina said. Students had been peering out windows all morning at the black smoke rising a few blocks from the school, in Bridgeport. But that still couldn’t prepare Carolina for her sister’s news that it was their family’s house that was burning.
The blaze destroyed everything, including the stuffed rabbit that was Carolina’s favorite toy. It also started an odyssey for the Martinez-Nava family that, at almost every step of the way, was stymied by COVID-19, whose shape and intensity was, especially in the beginning, poorly understood.
“We couldn’t believe there was so much stress,” Angelina Martinez-Nava, mother of the sisters and 4-year-old Alesander, said this summer through an interpreter.
Although what they experienced may have been extreme, today, every family has its pandemic story, one that—as data and anecdotes from health care professionals show—can be largely summarized by two words: anxiety and loss.
Melissa Mendez, a licensed clinical social worker and director of early childhood programs at Wheeler Clinic, said she thinks that for the rest of her professional career, she and others working in children’s mental health “will be dealing with the aftermath—if we ever get there—of this pandemic.”
Anxiety Persists Nationwide
Shortly after COVID-19 began its sweep across the country, health experts began warning about high rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents.
Kim Holyst, director of behavioral health at the Wheeler Family Health & Wellness Center in Waterbury, said counselors started to see “some pretty significant anxiety” among children and adolescents as soon as schools went to remote learning.
The children had “behavioral issues, increased irritability,” Holyst said, noting, “Their whole world had been turned upside down.”
By February 2021, an NBC/Stanford University survey showed that only a third of high school students “felt they were able to cope with their sources of stress, which include strained mental health and peer relationships.”
In June, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that visits to hospital emergency departments for suspected suicide attempts were more than 50% higher among girls 12-17 in February and March 2021 than in the same period in 2019.
Today, the Wheeler Clinic’s Mendez said the anxiety continues, linked to the “ongoing uncertainty” about COVID-19.
“Nobody ever knows for sure what’s happening day to day,” Mendez said. “There’s new research coming in, new recommendations being made, new drugs being approved.
“We’ve never really had anything like this,” Mendez said. “That, I think, has created a lot of anxiety and uncertainty with grownups in general, and that certainly filters down to children.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
The Martinez-Nava family (clockwise from right) Angelina Martinez-Nava and her children Alesander, 4, Carolina, 12 and Arlene, 14. “We couldn’t believe there was so much stress,” said Angelina.
Family Searches For Ways To Cope
The Martinez-Nava family soon found a new apartment, but their challenges continued to mount. Schools closed. The children’s father was diagnosed with COVID-19 and lost his landscaping job when he had to quarantine. Angelina, a cook at a restaurant, lost her position when the restaurant closed. For six weeks, no income came in.
Arlene and Carolina tried to keep up with their schoolwork by passing Arlene’s cellphone back and forth. Although they eventually got computers, their grades dropped as they struggled with the challenges of remote learning and those of their new home environment.
Angelina tried to keep things going, but her usually outgoing daughters pulled inward.
“I would lock myself in my room, and I would sleep through the day and be up at night,” Arlene said. “At random times,” she said, she and Carolina, “would just crack, and get angry with the world, with anyone around us.”
Carolina’s best friend had left Connecticut before the pandemic, and with schools closed, the younger girl had no one to talk to.
“I didn’t want to leave my room,” she said. “I would just stay there, in the corner. I was very worried, like scared, all the time. I’d most likely cry myself to sleep.”
Their mother arranged physicals for the girls at Southwest Community Health Center in Bridgeport. When she told the pediatrician how worried she was about them, he suggested reaching out to the center’s behavioral health staff.
‘We Really Did Need Therapy’
Nancy Wiltse, chief behavioral health officer at Southwest, said the number of families seeking mental health treatment for children and adolescents has soared, helped by the advent of telehealth.
Both girls saw counselors at Southwest, meeting with them on cellphones and then on computers through the year. With counseling, the sisters were able to process what was happening to them and, most importantly, find words for their feelings.
When the fire and the pandemic blew up their lives, Arlene said, “We didn’t know we had a problem.
“By the time we got to the end of professional therapy,” Arlene said, “that was when we thought, ‘We really did need therapy!’”
‘Pins And Needles’
With schools reopened, many families have been able to resume more familiar routines, even though the threat of COVID-19 continues to impede the country’s full resumption of “normal.”
Contributed Photo.
Melissa Mendez, director of Wheeler’s Early Childhood Programs.
Many people “had high hopes about what fall would be like,” Mendez said, “and now we’re here, and everybody just—I don’t know, it’s pins and needles, it’s bated breath.”
Some families that Wheeler counselors have been treating were not ready to send their children back to school, Mendez said.
They’re “upset that remote was not an option this fall,” she said.
“I think the children who are struggling more with the anxiety around the pandemic and what it means for them and being away from their parents again are probably having a harder time at school,” Mendez said.
She notes, however, that, “Children are actually pretty resilient and pretty adaptive, and many are happy to be in school again and see their friends, for the most part.”
But, Mendez warned, in the past 18 months, “a lot of families and children have gone through some pretty serious losses”—family members, people in their communities.
“We don’t really see a lot of discussion about that,” she said.
]]>But research shows that the food and beverages babies and toddlers consume influences their taste preferences and eating habits throughout life.
For babies, human milk, formula and water are all they need to drink for the first year, pediatricians say.
Dr. Michelle Van Name, a pediatric endocrinologist with Yale Medicine, tells her patients that cow’s milk is the recommendation for toddlers—and it’s less expensive than juices. She said toddlers should be introduced to water at an early age so they develop a taste for it because if they get used to sweet drinks, they won’t like water.
iStock Photo.
The new guidelines say that human milk, formula and water are all babies need to drink for the first year.
Now, for the first time, parents can find such research-based nutrition guidelines for babies and toddlers in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, produced by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services.
According to the new federal guidelines, once babies start eating solids at about 6 months, they can have water with their meals to develop a taste for it. After age 1, all children need to drink for healthy development is water and cow’s milk, the guidelines recommend. To reduce the chance of childhood obesity, the guidelines advise avoiding fruit juice or food with added sugar before age 1 and eating fruit rather than drinking fruit juice after 1. Children under 2 should avoid added sugars, including beverages sold as “toddler milks” and “toddler drinks,” the guidelines say.
Marlene Schwartz, director of UConn’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, said the federal dietary guidelines for birth to 2 years affirmed the center’s position that all that is needed is human milk, milk and water.
Marlene Schwartz
“One of the big controversies in the field right now is ‘toddler milks’ and ‘toddler drinks,’” Schwartz said. “The Rudd Center has done a lot of research, and we think they’re unnecessary. They’re being marketed in a very deceptive way,” she said. (The labels, written in English and Spanish, include wording suggesting the product supports brain development and immune systems.)
Growing childhood obesity rates drove many of the new recommendations: 14% of 2- to 5-year-olds have obesity; 18% of 6- to 11-year-olds have obesity; and 21% of 12- to 19-year-olds have obesity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2019. Among those 2 to 19, obesity prevalence reached 26% of Hispanics and 22% of Blacks, while 14% of whites and 11% of Asians, respectively, were obese, reports the CDC.
Schwartz would have preferred seeing the guidelines recommend avoiding even 100% fruit juice in the first two years of life, rather than saying that up to 4 ounces of 100% juice could be included in a healthy diet after age 1.
“I don’t love that,” she said. “It sounds like you should give your kids 100% juice.” Rudd Center-conducted studies found many parents thought some sugary drinks were healthy options because of how they’re marketed, she said.
It’s not the parents’ fault, she said. In the United States, food, beverage and restaurant companies spend nearly $14 billion per year on advertising, and more than 80% of the advertising promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy and unhealthy snacks, according to the Rudd Center. This overshadows the $1 billion budget for all chronic disease prevention and health promotion produced by the CDC, the Rudd Center found.
“I would have liked to see a stronger statement [in the guidelines] about providing small amounts of plain water when introducing food. And be more explicit: Water should be the beverage of choice,” Schwartz said. The guidelines state that after 12 months, toddlers only need milk and water, a clarity she appreciated.
With more mothers breastfeeding, infant formula sales have decreased, “so the formula companies had to create a new product to sell,” Schwartz said. “We’ve been very vocally critical of these products. These take advantage of young mothers.”
Bonnie Phillips Graphic.
Yale’s Van Name agreed, adding, “Kids do not need juice. It’s more nutritious to eat a piece of fruit than drink it as juice.” Juice “could contribute to excess calorie consumption,” she said.
Alia Reynolds wasn’t exposed to added sugar until she was 4, so she’s planning to keep processed sugar out of her baby’s diet for as long as possible. Based on her reading, the West Hartford mother says she has not given her 10-month-old daughter, Vivienne, any juice and doesn’t plan to. Vivienne drinks water from a straw with her meals, which Reynolds started giving her at about 6 months, again based on her reading.
Schwartz, who has been studying obesity for 15 years, said water needs to be the default beverage from the start. When elementary-school-aged children are overweight and pediatricians advise them to stop drinking juice and soda, parents say their kids don’t like water, she said.
Van Name also recommends children avoid sports drinks, which were designed for elite athletes. Children playing on local soccer and basketball teams do not need anything but water, she said.
“It’s important to start early on,” Van Name said. “Most of what we recommend is eat real food.”
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“We don’t accept screaming in our house,” said Betty’s mother, Laura Bower-Phipps, professor and coordinator of elementary education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. “So, we counted the screams, and when she hit three, my wife and I told her she needed to take a break for four minutes.” Betty took the break, came back and screamed three more times, and again went to her quiet spot for another four minutes.
And so, it went on.
Contributed Photo.
Laura Bower-Phipps and her daughter, Betty, read the comics page. During this time of social distancing, Betty misses her friends and school.
Parents, pediatricians and child psychologists across Connecticut are reporting an increase in tantrums, nightmares, and regressive behavior, weight gain, and mood swings among toddlers and young children. The mental health struggles spring from school closures and social distancing measures required to flatten the curve of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A study released this month in JAMA Pediatrics on the mental health status of children confined at home during the coronavirus outbreak in the Hubei Province of China, where the infectious disease originated, found that 22.6% of students surveyed reported having depressive symptoms, and 18.9% had symptoms of anxiety. “During the outbreak of COVID-19, the reduction of outdoor activities and social interaction may have been associated with an increase in children’s depressive symptoms,” the authors conclude.
The worldwide lockdown of public spaces and schools, while essential in stopping the spread of COVID-19, is proving to be the 21st century’s great social experiment on the long-term implications of social isolation on the mental health of children. National and local experts say the distress in children is made worse by the uncertainty surrounding the duration of the quarantine.
“The level of disruption COVID-19 is causing is what is considered toxic stress,” said Dr. Robert D. Keder, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
“Children have used up their emotional reserves, and with some, we see them falling apart at the smallest of things. It is really testing everyone, especially parents,” said Keder, who is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.
Megan Goslin
Megan Goslin, a clinical psychologist at Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, has observed that some children who had been potty-trained are having more accidents, and kids who were sleeping independently are now sneaking into mom and dad’s room.
“It makes a lot of sense that children do that because of how overwhelming it is,” Goslin said.
Beleaguered caregivers are increasingly turning to their preschools for help.
“One 3-year-old woke up from a nap and asked if his teacher is mad at him,” wondering why he’s not in school, said Niloufar Rezai, director of the Child and Family Development Resource Center at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Dr. Dara Richards, chief medical officer at Southwest Community Health Center in Bridgeport, said children, in particular, are vulnerable to the struggles of adapting to life in quarantine.
“Our behavioral health therapists are reporting that the lack of structure and support that was provided by day care or school has prompted or exacerbated psychiatric symptoms such as increased anxiety, anger outbursts and reactivity toward others,” Richards said. “This is more pronounced in children with diagnosed mental health disorders such as autism, ADHD, psychosis and mood disorders.”
“One 3-year-old woke up from a nap and asked if his teacher is mad at him,” wondering why he’s not in school.
— Niloufar Rezai
Across the state, parents say they see unexpected behavioral traits in their children. Cate Vallone, a Pilates instructor and single mother in Hartford, is overwhelmed by the new struggles of her preteen daughter Camilla.
“Most of the time, my 9-year-old is behaving like she is in middle school,” Vallone said. “Of course, it’s something I knew was coming, but I didn’t think it was a light switch that just turned on suddenly. She rolls her eyes. She gives me attitude. She tries to blame everything on me. And then after five or so days of us barely hanging on like that, all of a sudden she will walk into the kitchen with her arms out and say ‘I need a hug.’ And then just start crying on my lap when I sit down to hug her.”
The times that she’s broken down, Vallone said, Camilla didn’t want to talk. “She stays with me for the rest of the night and will watch TV and snuggle like we did before the isolation began,” Vallone pointed out. “After a safe night’s sleep, she’s back to her self-isolation from me.”
Parents are also feeling the pressure as financial, emotional and physical stressors rise. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 45% of adults in the United States reported that worries surrounding COVID-19 had impacted their mental health.
Heather Bassett, mother of Colby, 6, and Cooper, 2, broke down one night during the lockdown. Bassett teaches early childhood education at Mitchell College in New London and is an adjunct at Three Rivers Community College and Eastern Connecticut State University. Additionally, she runs a real estate business from home, without which, she said, she’d “be up a creek without a paddle financially.”
Cooper had repeatedly been asking to “go, go, car,” and Colby, who “hates this stupid virus,” has been increasingly unhappy at not knowing when COVID-19 will disappear.
“This is a very difficult time to be a parent of young children,” Bassett said. “Society is like, ‘OK, work from home.’ So, I’m running my household, doing laundry, dishes, dinner and lunches. All of that, and I’m expected to do the same kind of work that people without children, or with grown children, are doing. My frustration with that is mounting. At Zoom meetings, I don’t show my face anymore. I don’t have my mike on.”
Bassett said she tries hiding her stress from her children but is sure it’s coming through.
Tania Banks, 24, a single mother of two in Hartford, lost two of her five part-time jobs due to COVID-19.
“On a scale of one to 10, my stress levels are at nine,” Banks said. “One of the jobs I lost paid $23 an hour, and that’s a big impact on my income. On top of that, the kids get antsy being in the house all the time, and I get judged when I bring them outside, but it’s like what do I do? I’m eight months pregnant.”
Are you or your child feeling anxious? Here’s a partial list of mental health services for families:
• Connecticut Children’s pediatric COVID-19 hotline: 833-226-2362
• Childcare for essential workers during COVID-19: state of Connecticut portal.
• Childcare for health care and first responders: 860-756-0864.
• Parents and caregivers who are worried about routines, their children and finances can call 860-882-6405 to speak with Lisa Backus, a clinical psychologist at The Village for Families and Children in Hartford, on Mondays 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Tuesdays 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Wednesdays 1 to 5 p.m.
• For parents and caregivers who need someone to listen, to understand and to talk your feelings out, the state of Connecticut offers the “When it builds up, talk it out line” at 833-258-5011.
• For referrals to counseling services for adults, children and youth, call 2-1-1 of Connecticut.
• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has a Disaster Distress Helpline for 24/7 counseling and support for individuals who are distressed by natural or human-made disasters. Call 1-800-985-5990 to talk to a crisis counselor.
• The Yale Child Study Center and Scholastic Collaborative for Child and Family Resilience has a free downloadable workbook in English and Spanish titled “First Aid for Feelings: A Workbook to Help Kids Cope During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” by Denise Daniels. Download at the Collaborative’s website.
• The Child Mind Institute offers bereavement and grief support with a grief counselor for those who have lost a loved one due to COVID-19: 212-308-3118.
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They may be nonverbal, or act out. They’re often sick, but may not have a pediatrician. They may not even know how to brush their teeth.
“The impact on these young children is gigantic,” said Darcy Lowell, chief executive of Child First. Based in Trumbull, the agency provides counseling and practical help to families in their homes, and in homeless and domestic violence shelters.
About 1,660 Connecticut families with children under age 6 sought help in obtaining stable housing in 2018, according to state figures. There aren’t state statistics on the total number of young children who are homeless or in unstable housing situations. Many people remain under the radar and don’t seek help for a variety of reasons, such as hiding from domestic violence; fear that the state will take their children from them; or fear that a family they are staying with may be deported, advocates say.
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
Caroline and her younger sister, Charlotte, in their new home.
Now, for the first time, the state, children’s advocates and housing organizations are participating in an initiative that focuses specifically on pregnant women and children under 6 who are homeless or housing unstable. The three-year, $1 million collaborative intends to prevent homelessness and collect data, with the hope of avoiding lifelong problems and costly remedies.
“We will now have evidence about whether diverting children from shelters will have both short- and long-term outcomes, which is fantastic,” said Richard Cho, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH).
Tania Rodriguez lived in homeless shelters with her children from June to December. “In the end, who suffers the most? It’s the kids,” she said.
Her 3-year-old daughter, Charlotte, got so thin in the shelters that her pants wouldn’t stay up on her waist, Rodriguez said. Charlotte was continuously angry, distracted, crying and not interested in eating. The family, which also includes Caroline, 7, moved to a West Haven apartment in December. The children’s appetites have improved, and they are calm, although Caroline still gets chest pains believed to be stress-related, Rodriguez said.
For the Peaslee family of Vernon, housing insecurity has also taken a toll. Colton, 6, has angry outbursts, is hyperactive, constantly seeks attention, has difficulty following directions and often looks like he isn’t listening, said his mother, Rachel Peaslee.
Colton lived with his mother and sister in a homeless shelter for three months. Before that, the children split a year living with an aunt, then a day-care worker while their mother was in drug rehabilitation. “Being in an unstable situation, it’s a horrible thing,” Rachel Peaslee said.
Families in unstable housing can seek help from the state collaborative by calling 211, the United Way hotline. Assistance includes money for one-time expenses, such as car repairs, unpaid sick days or a security deposit, so they won’t be short on rent money. Over the next two years, housing programs will receive financial incentives for keeping families with a child younger than 6 out of homeless shelters and for offering help to children, such as developmental screenings.
The project is a collaboration of the state Office of Early Childhood, the Connecticut Department of Housing, the University of Connecticut School of Social Work and CCEH.
Preventing lifelong consequences like adult homelessness and alcohol and drug dependence is also a goal, Cho said.
Kathryn Parr, assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, is collecting data for the project. She anticipates periodic interviews with about 400 families over 12 months.
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
Tania Rodriguez with her daughters Charlotte and Caroline.
In 2016, Parr estimated that costs of services for homelessness can reach $122,450 per family, compared to about $1,000 per family for homeless diversion programs. A 2015 state study of homeless children estimated a broad range between 3,000 and 9,000 homeless families with young children in Connecticut. More specific numbers haven’t been determined.
Parr said little research has been done on the physical health of very young homeless children, but that studies of those between the ages of 5 and 10 found more asthma, ear infections, lead toxicity cases and emergency room visits.
A major concern is brain development, said Elena Trueworthy, director of the Connecticut Head Start Collaboration Office. She said homeless children are given priority for placement in Head Start preschool programs, where they bond with caregivers, eat nutritional food, make friends, and nap comfortably, all of which enhance brain development. While children are attending Head Start, parents get time to deal with their housing issues. In 2018, a total of 487 homeless pregnant women and children younger than 6 attended Head Start programs, Trueworthy said. Charlotte Rodriguez is now in a Head Start preschool.
Joan Neveski, clinical manager of Youth and Outpatient Clinical Services at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, said more services are needed. There aren’t “a lot of higher levels of care for these children,” she said, adding “you have to create a village around the family.”
Rodriguez, the West Haven mother, is being helped by such a village. She said she was a physician in Cuba before she moved to the U.S. 11 years ago seeking political asylum. But, here, she cleaned houses and worked in retail and fast food jobs. She now attends school to become a certified nursing assistant. Under the state Rapid Re-housing program, she was connected with New Reach, a nonprofit that focuses on housing stability. New Reach helped her with her lease and apartment inspection, administers state subsidies that pay a portion of her rent, and helps her obtain other services such as state-funded van transportation to the children’s schools so Rodriguez can get to her classes.
Out of the shelters, the children “have changed a lot,” Rodriguez said. “Their faces, their eyes, their look. They are happy now.”
]]>It may seem like a treat to some kids, but for Oliver – and a relatively small but growing number of children – it’s an important way he and his family manage his peanut allergy.
Racco, 7, who lives in West Hartford, eats the M&Ms as a daily “maintenance dose,” having recently completed an allergy desensitization process at the New England Food Allergy Treatment Center in West Hartford. The process is intended to protect people with severe allergies in the case of accidental ingestion.
“Since we’ve gone through the treatment, it has taken away a lot of that worry,” said Racco’s mother, Jessica. She takes some comfort in knowing her son will be all right if he accidentally eats or is exposed to peanuts, she said. He also has a tree nut allergy.
Desensitization is a relatively new treatment option, according to Dr. Jeffrey Factor, medical director of the food allergy treatment center, which began offering the program about nine years ago.
While it’s gaining popularity, most people with food allergies aren’t undergoing the process — due either to lack of access or of awareness — and most manage their allergies by avoiding allergens, he said.
Food allergies are increasingly common among children. Nationwide, an estimated 8% of children— one in every 13 kids, or about two students per classroom— have a food allergy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the occurrence of childhood food allergies jumped 50% between 1997 and 2011.
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
The Racco family preparing to eat dinner.
“There are definitely much more allergies,” said Dr. Gary Soffer, assistant professor of clinical pediatrics in Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital’s Department of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy, Immunology and Sleep Medicine. “There’s a lot of research and there are a lot of theories [as to why]. There’s definitely not a consensus.”
A contributing factor, Soffer said, likely is the growing use of antibacterial products like hand sanitizers, and a reluctance to introduce allergens to kids’ diets.
“We’re trying to keep our kids cleaner and safer … but by doing that, we’re not really strengthening their immune systems like we used to,” he said. “A lot of times, what that ends up doing is causing allergies.”
That theory is gaining traction in recent research, said Mary Peterson, a clinical assistant professor of nursing and director of the accelerated nursing program at Quinnipiac University. She’s also a pediatric nurse practitioner and the mother of an adult son with severe allergies to dairy and tree nuts.
“We’re too clean. We’re not exposing children to a variety of things in the environment, so when they come in contact with certain things in foods, their body is seeing it as bad,” she said.
The most common food allergens among children nationwide are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, wheat, soy, peanuts and tree nuts, according to the CDC. In people with food allergies, their immune systems mistakenly respond to food as if it were harmful. The most severe reaction is anaphylaxis, which can be fatal in extreme cases.
Part of a daily routine, Oliver eats two peanut M&Ms and a chocolate bar with walnuts after munching on a bowl of Goldfish crackers.
“When a child has been diagnosed with a food allergy, you can’t predict what a reaction is going to be,” Peterson said. Anaphylaxis “is not a common thing that happens, but it does.”
The greatest risk for anaphylaxis stems from accidental ingestion, Soffer said.
“The risk of anaphylaxis is very low, but it’s there. I reassure parents that as long as they’re safe about it and have a good action plan, they really do lower the risk,” he said.
Kristen Yahwak of Middletown says the impact was significant and immediate once her daughter Lucy, 8, could finally eat peanuts after years of being allergic.
“For her, it’s really life-changing at this point, and for us too,” Yahwak said. “For years, I’d been holding my breath, and it was like I was finally able to breathe. It was very exciting.”
Lucy, who was diagnosed with a peanut allergy at age 2, is no longer considered allergic after undergoing a desensitization process at the West Hartford center.
It’s been a more complicated journey for Yahwak’s son Ben, who is 5 and has severe peanut and tree nut allergies. He has completed the desensitization process, but doctors are cautious and don’t want him to test whether it worked quite yet.
Protecting against accidental ingestion is the main goal of desensitization processes like the one at the center, according to Factor, who also is a professor of pediatrics at UConn School of Medicine and division head of allergy and immunology at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
“The treatment is not really a cure,” he said, adding a growing number of people are undergoing the process. “It’s really a desensitization to provide [people with allergies] with protection against accidental ingestion. More and more people are becoming aware that this is a viable treatment option.”
Typically, at patients’ first visit to the center, they are given increasing doses of an allergen to determine the maximum amount they can tolerate. They then return every two weeks for an up-dosing visit, during which they receive a single dose of the allergen until they reach a “maintenance dose,” he said.
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
Jessica Racco places chunks of walnuts onto a food scale. Her son, Oliver, eats about four grams of walnuts, covered in chocolate, to help build his tolerance to nut allergies.
Once patients reach a maintenance dose level, they consume a certain amount of the allergen — say, several peanuts or peanut M&Ms — regularly.
People with peanut allergies tend to benefit the most from the process, he said, with roughly 85% to 90% seeing positive results — compared with roughly 70% to 75% of those with milk allergies, for instance. The process takes 10 to 12 months.
For Racco, the process offered peace of mind: “If [Oliver] is exposed to it somehow, whether it’s in something he’s eating, or on a table [at school] from a student before him, he will not have a reaction because of this treatment. He’s protected. It’s been well worth it.”
Sending young children to school can be particularly stressful for parents. The state Department of Education has guidelines for how school districts should manage food allergies. The guidelines, established under state law in 2006, say each local and regional board of education must implement a plan based on the guidelines, and make the plan available on a board or school website.
But the guidelines deal largely with how to store and administer medication like Epi-Pens, giving schools leeway in how they handle allergies. Some have banned allergens from the classroom or school altogether, some assign students with severe allergies to designated tables in cafeterias, others have children with allergies eat in classrooms rather than cafeterias, and some schools with older students allow students with and without allergies to eat together.
School staff and bus drivers must be trained to recognize the signs of anaphylaxis and administer an Epi-Pen, under state law.
Even as awareness of food allergies and treatment options increase, the dangers are constantly at the forefront of parents’ minds, said Peterson.
“When you have a child that has a life-threatening allergy to food, it is extremely stressful,” she said. “It has a big impact on quality of life for these families.”
]]>Ben’s dad took him home. “My husband called me and said, ‘Have you ever done a nebulizer treatment and have it not work?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and at that point he realized something was wrong,” Buckley said.
Forty minutes after they left the basketball game, Ben was unconscious in their driveway. A police officer was giving him CPR. Ben was rushed to a hospital where a team worked to revive him. They got his heart beating again, but doctors said Ben had minimal brain activity. Days later, Ben was removed from life support and died.
Bryan Proctor Photo.
Cristin Buckley has been raising awareness about asthma since her son’s death in 2014.
Buckley of Southington said she never knew you could die from an asthma attack but by the time she learned that it was possible, it was too late.
In 2017, 3,564 people nationally died of asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 10 people a day. In Connecticut, 38 people died that year. The CDC reports that most asthma deaths are avoidable with proper treatment and care.
In Connecticut, about 299,336 people are living with asthma. Nationally, 25 million Americans have asthma; about 7.7% are adults and 8.4% are children.
“The asthma rate in Connecticut is about 10% in children and 10% in adults,” said Michelle Caul, director, Eastern Division, Health Promotions at American Lung Association.
She said that an asthma diagnosis can be challenging with children.
“Sometimes the only symptom that presents in children is coughing, and obviously coughing is a symptom of 1,000 other things, so ruling out all of those other things in order to get an asthma diagnosis can sometimes be difficult,” Caul said.
Giving Back To Community
Buckley didn’t know her son’s asthma wasn’t well controlled until after his death, when she was in Washington, D.C., attending Asthma and Allergy Day at Capitol Hill with her husband. While listening to a doctor speak about the signs of asthma not being well controlled, she said, she realized what happened to Ben.
“Nobody had ever told us that [Ben’s] asthma wasn’t well controlled,” she said. “Nobody ever told us that you shouldn’t be using albuterol [a rescue inhaler] that much, that his asthma wasn’t controlled, and we had no idea. He was going to his regular appointments with his asthma doctor. He went to his pediatrician. No one ever told us.”
That moment of realization is what motivated Buckley to do what she views as her most important role as a parent who has lost a child to asthma—raising awareness about asthma and supporting community programs, especially in the arts. Ben aspired to be an artist.
Buckley Family Photo.
Ben Buckley
Buckley and her husband, Jeffrey, decided to form a nonprofit, Ben Was Here. The seed money for the nonprofit came from about $40,000 in donations that they received while Ben was hospitalized.
“We were talking in the hospital, and my husband said, ‘I don’t want to keep this. You should do something with it,’” she said. So, we decided to start a nonprofit.
Over the years, the funds raised have been donated to the elementary school their children attend, a program dedicated to cultural arts in Southington, iPads for children in the school where Buckley taught, the library building project, and to help cover the cost of prescriptions for asthma medication.
Buckley said the foundation tries to help anybody it can.
In talking about what she’s most proud of Buckley said, “I think I’m really proud of the awareness we’re bringing about asthma to the state.”
Awareness about uncontrolled asthma is particularly important. Caul says there’s a quick formula to determine if a rescue inhaler is being used too often.
“If you’re taking your quick-relief inhaler more than two times per week, and you’re waking up at night with asthma symptoms more than two times per month, and if you’re refilling your quick-relief inhaler more than two times per year, your asthma is probably not well-controlled.”
To help take care of someone with asthma, Caul said, its important educate yourself. “The American Lung Association has an online program, which is free of charge, with an hour-long module called asthma basics. It’s a good starting place for parents of children with asthma, anybody who has asthma, or anybody who is a caretaker of somebody with asthma.”
She also said to ask questions and stay in contact with you doctor.
“If you feel like your child’s asthma is not well controlled, you should be in contact with your primary care physician.”
For information on Ben Was Here click this link.
Bryan Proctor
Bryan is a senior in his last semester studying journalism and history at Quinnipiac University. He plans to work as a full-time journalist after graduation in his home state of Massachusetts. In his free time, you can find him playing guitar, watching movies, or hiking outdoors.
]]>Although he was scheduled to work from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., the Honduran native said through a Spanish-speaking interpreter that he would get out between midnight and 1 a.m. and then still be asleep when his son left for school the next morning.
“He takes medication so he can concentrate and gets treatment at school,” Gomez said of his son. “But when I saw what was happening with my schedule, that it was impacting his ability to focus even though he was getting treatment, I only worked there a couple of weeks.”
More than one-fourth of the state’s 885,000 hourly employees who potentially face wide swings in work schedules are parents of children under the age of 18, putting their kids at risk for behavioral issues, a newly released report by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth concluded.
Women and men of color are more likely not to have any input on their schedules and people of color, particularly black and Latina women, are more likely to have unstable work schedules including extended shifts, last minute “on-call” shifts, and shifts canceled after they have arrived at work, compared to their white counterparts, the report found based on data from the national Shift Project.
Their children are paying the price, said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District. “It’s really unbelievable that women of color have no input into their schedules,” DeLauro said. “How do you plan for childcare or family care? What if you want to go to school? It takes a toll on kids.”
DeLauro and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, a Democratic presidential candidate, are again introducing the Schedules That Work Act aimed at reducing work scheduling inequalities by requiring companies in the retail, hospitality, cleaning, restaurants and warehousing industries to provide work schedules two weeks in advance.
The bill, which has failed to pass twice in recent years, includes provisions to protect hourly workers who ask for shift changes from retaliation and protect employees from being forced to work a closing shift at night and an opening shift the next morning, commonly called a “clopen,” less than 11 hours later.
“What happens if your kid is sick?” DeLauro said. “This has very serious implications for families. We’re dealing mostly with women. This is a lack of respect and lack of dignity for their lives or their family’s lives.”
It’s common for low-wage workers with on-call or “just-in-time” schedules to choose between paying bills or going without something they need, said Norma Martinez Hosang, Organizing Director for Make The Road, a non-profit that advocates for immigrants and low-income residents in Bridgeport.
“People don’t get a schedule week by week so they can’t plan,” Martinez Hosang said. “Getting called off from work is another problem. You’re expecting to go to work and you get there and you get sent home. They were counting on that money. You can imagine in terms of budgeting what that does. Families who are making minimum wage are already struggling.”
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
Emelia Huerta and her daughter, Flor, in the living room of their Bridgeport home. Huerta worked through a temp agency as a housekeeper. She said she often worked more hours than she was originally scheduled. Those extra hours were never paid. She quit and now runs her own cleaning service.
But the impact of scheduling inequality extends far beyond a paycheck, experts said. Nationally, parents who work on-call or experience last minute shift changes have 15 days annually when their children are in the care of a sibling younger than age 10 or have no childcare at all compared to parents with better work schedules who average nine days annually with no suitable childcare, the study found.
Children of parents with unstable schedules are more likely to have multiple caregivers, which adds stress and makes it less likely for them to forge good relationships with each. The children of on-call workers are also more likely to experience sadness, worry and anger, exhibited through arguing, tantrums and disobedience, the center’s report said.
“My children would throw it in my face,” said Emelia Huerta, a 45-year-old Spanish-speaking Bridgeport resident who talked as Martinez Hosang interpreted. “They’d say, ‘You never eat with us, you’re never here for us, Dad takes us to get ice cream, but you’re never here.’ ’’
“This has very serious implications for families.
We’re dealing mostly with women. This is a lack of respect and lack of dignity for their lives or their family’s lives.”
— U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro
Like Gomez, the amount of work Huerta was assigned in her commercial cleaning job night after night never allowed her to finish on time. She quit after six or seven years and now does cleaning on her own so she has a more flexible schedule. “On the one hand we needed the money, but I was also missing time with my children,” she said.
The instability prohibits on-call or hourly workers from going to school to better their circumstances, work a second job, budget for monthly bills and needs or move up the ladder, said Carlos Moreno, communications director of the Connecticut Working Families Party, which is supporting a state bill that would also tighten scheduling laws for hourly workers.
“You’re living your life on call,” Moreno said. People often must take multiple jobs to maintain housing and other necessities, which is a challenge if one employer continually asks workers to come in at the last minute, he said.
It’s also a challenge when an hourly worker must pay for childcare and then is told to go home because it’s slow, Moreno said. “You’re hiring a babysitter and then you don’t work,” he said. “It’s a situation that’s untenable. It leads to the quicksand effect where they feel they can’t get out.”
DeLauro acknowledges that her bill has little chance of passing under the current administration. It will be up to individual states to take up the cause and press for changes in corporate behavior, she said.
“We’ve moved to an economy based on part-time work,” said state Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, who plans on backing a fair-scheduling bill with her Labor and Public Employee Committee co-chair, Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, in the upcoming state legislative session. Businesses benefit by having a workforce that can adjust to the ebb and flow of clients, she said.
“But the toll it takes on families and individuals is incredible,” Kushner said. “You can be called in at any time. It really makes it hard to plan childcare or your budget. There has to be some controls on the system. There should be some cost to the employer.”
The bill will likely include provisions requiring employers to give 72 hours’ notice for shifts and pay employees for at least a few hours if a scheduled shift is canceled.
A few similar bills failed to make it out of committee in the past two state legislative sessions. Nearly every trade association representing the restaurant, hotel and retail industries in the state spoke out against the proposal during a legislative public hearing.
Few on-call or hourly workers have a union that can negotiate for them, which is why the state needs to create a more level playing field, Kushner said. “This will make a difference,” she said. “Not just for the workers, but for the quality of life in Connecticut.”
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Photo by Melanie Stengel
Sharon Lovett-Graff, the manager of the Mitchell branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, helps Lydia Anderson, 3, with the computer. In the background Laura Anderson helps Lydia’s brother Ethan Anderson, 4 1/2, select books.
The Mitchell branch of the New Haven Free Public Library tries to be at the forefront of whatever products are trendy or new. That means offering e-books for patrons of all ages and providing computers for children who want to conduct research online or play games. But, according to branch manager Sharon Lovett-Graff, the library’s youngest patrons, and their parents, remain interested primarily in borrowing print books.
“At one time, we were all very nervous that e-books would take over. But not anymore,” said Lovett-Graff, who estimates that in the past year, the library checked out about 5,300 board books — thick, picture books aimed at pre-readers. “I don’t hear parents asking about e-books for toddlers,” she observed.
Recent research supports the reluctance of educational experts and parents to place electronic readers within reach of very young children.
The most recent study to scrutinize the emerging trend of e-readers for young audiences was published in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) journal Pediatrics. The study, which analyzed interactions of 37 parent–toddler pairs while reading together electronic versus print books, found that parents and toddlers verbalized and collaborated less when parents read stories from e-readers than from the pages of a book. “This is an intriguing and important study that adds to what we know about the importance of reciprocal interactions between young children and their caregivers for healthy brain development,” said Linda Mayes, MD, professor of child psychiatry, pediatrics and psychology in the Yale Child Study Center.
Publication of these study results came sandwiched between recent recommendations by two major health organizations, both of which have imposed strict limits on screen time for very young children. This past April, the World Health Organization came out with its first-ever recommendation regarding screen time, asserting that children under 1 year of age should have virtually none. In 2016, the AAP released a lengthy statement on screen time broken down by age group, stating that children younger than 18 months should avoid use of all screen media other than video-chatting, and that screen time for children ages 2 to 5 should be limited to an hour per day of “high-quality programs.”
At the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield, families who wanted to utilize computers or other technology in the children’s section are at a loss. The library deliberately maintains a technology-free children’s section that, anecdotally, appears to be bucking the technology-friendly trend of most libraries, statewide and throughout the nation.
Caroline Wilcox Ugurlu, PhD, a library assistant at the Oliver Wolcott Library, explains that while library professionals recognize that digital mediums are here to stay, some would like to hold off on exposing their young patrons to electronics for as long as is reasonably possible. “Many libraries are cognizant of the addictive nature and attention-scattering nature of digital mediums,” she said.
Reading Books Boosts Literacy
In addition to the heightened, richer vocabulary that books present to toddlers, the shared context of the experience is a key component to its value, explains Michael Coyne, professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and co-director of the Center for Behavioral Education and Research. “It’s an opportunity for caregiver and child to engage in conversations and interactions unlike their day-to-day exchanges,” Coyne said.
While traditional books facilitate this engagement, he suggests that electronic devices may have the opposite effect. “The technology can become more the focus of the activity, rather than the content or the language,” Coyne observed.
His observations mirror those of other experts. For instance, an AAP statement asserted: “Interactive enhancements [as found in e-readers] may decrease child comprehension of content or parent dialogic reading interactions.” Pop-up ads, sound effects, and even the buttons on an electronic device are just some of its elements that can promote distraction. As a result, the distractions inherent to e-readers may replace or interfere with the spontaneous interactions that normally take place between parents and children while reading print books, suggests Yale’s Mayes.
Photo by Melanie Stengel
Sharon Lovett-Graff and a selection of books at the New Haven Free Public Library’s Mitchell branch.
Literacy experts observe that many of the interactions that take place while reading print books together encourage “child-directed talk” — a key component to social and cognitive growth. Oliver Wolcott Library’s Ugurlu explains. “In child-directed talk, a caregiver and a child focus on each other, taking cues from one another’s facial expressions,” she said. On the contrary, notes Ugurlu, young children and adults tend to have more scattered focus when reading from an electronic device as opposed to a book. This runs counter to the conditions for reading, which Ugurla notes requires “deep focus.”
Does The Medium Matter?
It’s unlikely that toddlers are able to muster focus considered “deep,” especially in the absence of direct engagement with a caregiver. That could be why reading books with toddlers has, historically, been a shared activity. But with alluring electronic devices offering stories to children of all ages, that may be changing. And some bibliophiles are okay with that.
Sarah Briggs is a part-time librarian at Wallingford Public Library, a library/media specialist at Jonathan Law High School, a board member of the Connecticut Library Consortium, and mother to a 3- and 5-year-old. She does acknowledge the shared experience of reading with her young children as an “important bonding experience.” But she’s not too concerned with the medium used to convey the story.
“My children are very comfortable exploring phones, iPads, and those things. If there’s a story they want, they’ll pick the format based on what they’re looking for,” said Briggs, who believes that electronic devices can complement and supplement books, but not replace them.
“I just want to get them to sit and appreciate stories. The format, to me, is not so much the point,” Briggs said.
Others aren’t convinced that the format is inconsequential. Kyn Taylor, executive director of the Branford-based nonprofit Read to Grow, believes that reading print books to young children affords more spontaneity and variety than e-readers. “I serve up a question to you, then you respond, and it goes from there,” she said. “There seems to be a lot less of that when there’s a flat screen.”
Taylor does acknowledge that most of today’s parents grew up as “digital natives.” It’s only natural, then, that they would readily share information with their children via electronic devices. But she urges parents not to ditch print books altogether. “Let them turn the pages. Let them bite it. Let the book be an enhancement of your home,” Taylor said.
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