But how, then, does one explain the Bogles, a Texas-Tennessee clan that has been running afoul of the law across multiple generations going back to the Civil War? This one single family, Butterfield discovered, had been responsible for stealing cars and brewing moonshine, burglaries and bombings, manslaughters and murders. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles all had taken part in the wayward family business.

And Butterfield’s research would reveal that the Bogles weren’t a statistical exception. Multiple studies have shown that only about 5 percent of all families account for fully half of all crime in the United States, and 10 percent account for two out of every three crimes committed here. Could genetics be a determining factor in why people break the law?

That troubling, counter-intuitive question runs through Butterfield’s new book, In My Father’s House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. It also underscored the Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, titled “Do Americans Misunderstand the Roots of Crime?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

In the discussion, moderated by Olney, the venerable host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” Butterfield explained how he’d stumbled onto a family whose members have spent much of their lives shuttling in and out of prisons.

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the waning years of the U.S.-Indochina war before taking up crime reporting, already had written a highly praised book about an African American family that fell into crime, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995).

Butterfield had been searching for a white crime family to profile when a friend in Oregon put him in touch with the Bogles, 60 of whose members have served prison time. The patriarch, Rooster Bogle, had spread what his kinfolk called “the family curse” to his own nine offspring and two wives. He would take his kids out with him on crime sprees, from a young age. Occasionally, he would point out the local penitentiary and tell his progeny to take a good look because that’s where they, too, were going to end up later in life.

Being born a Bogle was like being served a guilty verdict in the maternity ward, being handed down a fate through your bloodlines. As one of Rooster’s sons told Butterfield, “What you’re raised with you grow to become. There’s no escape.”

Sensing the packed audience’s growing unease and astonishment at this information, Olney commented, “If you think this sounds like a series from Netflix or HBO, you’re absolutely right.”

Indeed, though the Bogles may have been uneducated and poor, their lore is rich with improbable stories and details that a novelist might shun because they strain credibility. The family forebears got their start brewing up moonshine in a Southern hamlet, then later tried to gain a federal government pension for a relative who claimed to have been a captain in the Union Army. (He wasn’t.)

From what might euphemistically be called white-collar crimes, the family graduated to more serious fare. Rooster and his siblings didn’t go to school, but they did get to meet Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, while their parents kept food on the table by working in a traveling carnival and hawking moonshine on the side.

When Rooster turned 16 his entire family took part in a burglary at a local grocery store that netted about $20,000. Although his mother had masterminded the heist, Rooster pleaded guilty when the police came calling, sparing his mother and launching his own long career as a cellblock resident.

Asked by Olney how he’d managed to get these confessional stories, Butterfield replied that some family members had been reluctant at first, but eventually cooperated because they’d actually read Butterfield’s earlier book, and somehow reckoned that he might turn the Bogle family into celebrities if he wrote about them.

Butterfield was able to validate much of what the Bogles told him through police and court reports. He also encountered a judge in Salem, Oregon who over time had had four generations of Bogles appear before his bench. “It was a family value being passed down,” Butterfield said. “When we talk about family values being passed down, we usually mean good family values, but they can be rotten family values, too.”

The same judge told Butterfield that he’d dealt with four other families that spanned four generations of criminals. From that experience, the judge had concluded that simply locking people up doesn’t work; criminal family members needed to be separated, the judge reasoned.

But asserting that crime may be caused, even partially, by genetics, can be a controversial and, some experts would argue, a racist and discriminatory claim. Such genetically based arguments have lost favor over the decades because of their association with 19th-century junk science, and with the Nazis’ criminal experiments in the concentration camps. Civil rights and African American organizations also have strongly challenged and criticized the idea that genetics—rather than institutionalized racism and social inequality—could account for the disproportionate number of incarcerated men of color, said Butterfield, who added pointedly that white Americans still commit the majority of crimes. “People tend to forget that,” he said.

And yet the grim destiny of the Bogle family may indicate that criminal behavior can get programmed into certain groups of people. Although one Bogle female acquired religion and managed to shake free of her home, Butterfield said, “It’s not easy making it out of there. She made it out, but her younger sister didn’t.”

So what, Olney asked, is the way to solve this?

Butterfield said that we need better ways to get information about peoples’ family histories of incarceration—not in order to stigmatize the family, but so as to get them help. In the same way that doctors ask patients about their families’ medical histories of diabetes and high blood pressure, we should be asking people who commit crimes about their family’s criminal records.

One outcome of gathering such useful information is that a judge then would be able to give the family of a troubled kid the option of having what’s called a “multi-systemic therapy” team of therapists, social workers, and other medical professionals who actually move into the family home. Living at close quarters allows the team to closely observe and monitor the family, analyze how it works, and turn its younger members toward better role models. Such teams of professionals have treated thousands of families and are showing “pretty good results,” Butterfield said. But these studies still are in their infancy, he added.

Another approach is to move criminals away from the communities where their bad behavior took root. Butterfield said the power of moving was observed in the case of Louisiana state prisoners from New Orleans who relocated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Crescent City in 2005. Setting down roots in a new state broke the criminals’ social networks, giving them a better shot at starting over fresh.

This is important because people who spend a lot of time in jails and prisons become institutionalized to living there. Butterfield said he has seen fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, who share the same prison cell, an arrangement that reinforces anti-social behaviors and leaves people more dependent on their blood relatives and less able to cope when they’re released back into society.

Fielding questions from the audience, Butterfield was asked if he knew of any studies of crime rates in Australia, some of whose early immigrant population comprised inmates banished by the British to the Empire’s farthest reaches. Given that background, one might expect Oz to have high crime rates, the questioner said. Butterfield replied that he couldn’t speak specifically to Australia’s case, but said that the United States has had very high violent crime rates since the 18th century, especially homicides.

Another audience member asked how the relatively small budgets for rehabilitation contribute to recidivism among criminals, including criminal families. Butterfield agreed that prisons spend most of their funds on housing and guards, and suggested that more money could be better spent on programs like court-ordered multi-systemic family therapy.

Ultimately, nature and nurture work together and complement each other, Butterfield said, assigning some people normal lives, and others lives of violence, punishment, and isolation. “I don’t think you can separate the two,” he said.

The post Can Criminals Be Genetically Determined? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I believe that the Trump presidential campaign, and certainly the Trump administration’s policies, are a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise immigrants, and even latter-generation children of immigrants, from American politics. The Trump administration is doing this through its current efforts to go after “voter fraud” as well as through its onerous immigration policies. In response, what you’re seeing in California and Los Angeles is immigrant voters asserting themselves in opposition.

The national pushback from immigrant voters was evident in the 2016 Presidential election. To a greater degree than was true of the overall U.S. voting population—and to a greater degree than was true of all Democrats as a group, or of U.S.-born Latinos and Asians—immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton. As a group, immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens, and who actually vote, are much more progressive than their U.S.-born second- or third-generation cousins.

This tendency didn’t originate with the 2016 election; it has been growing over time. Our data clearly show that in California, specifically in Los Angeles, immigrant voters—including those who are now U.S. citizens—are much more politically progressive than more assimilated immigrants, and more than Democrats overall, as measured by the candidates they back and the policy initiatives they support. That’s true of immigrants in general, as well as immigrants belonging to the two largest immigrant groups, Latinos and Asians

One reason for the progressive mindset of L.A. immigrant voters is that the process of naturalization, and the pro-active sense of becoming a U.S. citizen, gives immigrants the feeling of being invested in the rights, and rites, of citizenship. But in comparison with immigrants in other parts of the United States, L.A. immigrants stand out. They’re much more politically progressive than immigrants in, say, Texas or the South. (However, immigrants in Texas and the South are more progressive than the overall voting population in those regions.)

Immigrants who can vote, and are U.S. citizens, don’t have the same amount of fear as non-citizen immigrants, and don’t have to worry about living in the shadows. Nonetheless, they’re highly motivated to vote because they may be trying to protect other members of their immediate and extended families, their neighbors, or their friends and colleagues.

The main point here is that the California’s movement toward becoming a deep-blue state—from a state in which the Republican presidential candidate used to be competitive in an election, and in which it wasn’t unusual to have a Republican governor, to a state in which those conditions seem unlikely—is due in large part to the migration of Latinos and Asians from being moderates, or showing equal support for both parties, to now being overwhelmingly Democratic. While it’s well-established that the battle over Proposition 187 and the 1994 governor’s race drove Latinos in droves to become Democrats and progressives, there also has been a dramatic migration of Asian voters to the Democratic Party, partly as a reaction against Republican policies.

What drives them is, number one, their desire for policies that protect all immigrants, and, number two, their support for providing social services to immigrants, especially education. That’s why immigrants overwhelmingly vote for school bond measures—and other measures like public mass transportation, on which immigrants tend to be much more dependent than the population as a whole.

Here’s a prominent example of how L.A. and California politics have been affected by the migration of immigrants to the progressive side of the political spectrum. In 1996, Ron Unz, who ran for governor, also helped fund and spearhead an initiative that basically outlawed bilingual education. His supporters would never say that bilingual education should be outlawed, but the conditions that the initiative imposed on how bilingual had to be taught were so onerous and difficult for both school districts and parents that, for all intents and purposes, it eliminated bilingual education in many classrooms.)

It was a highly contentious and debated issue in the ’90s. But by last year, California voters had changed so much that the initiative never captured the voting public’s imagination or became an issue. The 2016 vote to overturn it, through Proposition 58, easily passed by a 73 to 27 percent margin.

Immigration-driven changes to politics don’t show up only in voting patterns. They also change who runs for office. These patterns were made visible in this year’s April 4 special election for the 34th U.S. Congressional District, and in the June 6 runoff. Significantly, many of the candidates running for the 34th Congressional District were children of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, as were many of the candidates running for Assembly District 51 to replace Jimmy Gomez, who won the 34th Congressional seat.

We’re seeing similar patterns nationally in the reaction to Trump—in the number of immigrants who are thinking about running for office, including those who have declared as candidates for Congress in 2018. The number of people who’ve announced their candidacies for congressional seats is much higher at this point in time than in any previous era in memory—and not only the total number of candidates, but also the number of candidates who have raised money. It is not inconceivable that of the eight statewide offices on the ballot in California, five could be won by Latinos and two by Asians.

What happened in the 34th in Los Angeles this year is a precursor to everything that we’re going to see in 2018: We’re going to see a lot of people running for office for the first time, and a lot of young people—including immigrants and people who work for and with immigrant groups. Of course, you don’t have to be U.S.-born to run for Congress, although you do have to be a U.S. citizen.

Mayor Garcetti’s re-election illustrates that immigrant and minority voters will support candidates of other ethnicities, if those candidates take positions that are perceived to help immigrants and minorities. White voters across the country, all other things being equal, will vote for white candidates to a much greater degree than Latino voters will vote for Latino candidates given similar choices. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom—people often think, and say, that Latinos voting for Latinos is ethnic politics, but they never say that whites voting for whites is ethnic politics. But we have a lot of data that shows whites vote for whites to a greater degree than Latinos vote for Latinos.

Greater Los Angeles provides a strikingly clear example of how Trump’s policies are driving immigrants of all ethnicities and nationalities to become more politically active and more politically progressive. It’s all about the current immigration issues—including issues such as homelessness and sanctuary cities—which many people feel aren’t being dealt with at the federal level. L.A. immigrant voting and civic participation trends bode well for Democrats, and badly for Republicans, in the years and decades to come—both in California and the nation.

The post As Trump Targets Immigrants, Their Families Are Pushing Back at the Ballot Box appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“He has something wrong with each tooth,” the dental student said in amazement. “He has to be in constant pain.” I nodded my agreement, not really surprised by the news.

I’m the principal of Victoria Elementary School in San Bernardino, where the dental student was assessing Eric’s oral wellness as part of the annual fall screening we bring to all 500 children in our student body. In partnership with Loma Linda University’s dental school, which triages the worst cases and then follows up weekly with their mobile clinic, this program treats our students throughout the school year. For many kids, it’s the only dental care they receive.

Eric had a bright, cheerful demeanor and near perfect attendance, making it all the more incredible to learn that he’d been living in pain. Thankfully, the dental school put Eric and his sister at the top of their patient list—after two years of treatment, their dental health is finally approaching normal.

Eric and Madeline’s circumstances are not unique at our school. In our zip code, half of the children live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. Almost monthly we have students undergoing extractions of abscessed teeth caused by bacterial infections, which, left untreated, can spread to the jaw, neck, and brain causing even more serious medical conditions.

Victoria Elementary School students receive dental check-ups.

To me, Eric’s teeth represent a problem in the way we measure whether we are providing economically disadvantaged students with educational opportunities on par with their wealthier peers. In addition to academic support, we must factor in the many needs of our children beyond the classroom. Are they hungry? Did they sleep? Basic necessities cannot be assumed when dealing with poverty because we know that hungry and tired children do not perform well in class.

In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown shifted state educational funds to allocate more per-pupil to students from low-income families, and to increase local control. This shift will enable Victoria to expand the range of services to support our students. Starting this school year, we now have a person dedicated to following up with students in everything from school work, basic needs, and most importantly, emotional support for the psychological effects of poverty.

I was introduced to Victoria Elementary seven years ago, when a colleague called it a “hidden gem.” Through a fluke of geography, Victoria is located in San Bernardino, but it’s part of the neighboring Redlands school district. The differences are stark. Redlands, a city in the top 100 best places to live in California, is a “destination district.” It’s where teachers want to teach, students want to learn, and parents want their children to go to school. Transfer requests are many and successful transfers are highly coveted. San Bernardino, on the other hand, is third from the bottom on that same list of 240 cities. Poverty is high. Security is uncertain, both in terms of personal safety and food security.

Given the unmet needs in this community—needs as fundamental as food, clothing, and shelter—I consider myself lucky that when I took the principal position at Victoria, I inherited a Family Resource Center (FRC) on my campus. The FRC is our hub for community outreach. Originally funded through California’s Healthy Start Initiative, Redlands Unified has retained four FRCs across the district. Staffing duties are shared by a case manager from a local charity and a school worker.

Working in a community where many lack the basics, I’ve come to learn that poverty doesn’t mean impoverishment. The families that make up the Victoria community are generous with what they have. Neighbors often walk each other’s children to school. It’s also common for them to open their homes to one another so that parents have a place where they can leave their children before starting their early morning commutes to work. Even with this esprit de corps, more is needed.

Addressing hunger is one of the most vital issues we deal with. The school, formerly surrounded by orange groves and strawberry fields, now lies in the middle of a food desert. Many of our families don’t have cars, and public transit is both slow and sporadic, especially on weekends. There’s a liquor store nearby, but the nearest market is a five-mile round-trip walk.

More than 90 percent of Victoria’s students participate in the National School Lunch Program and receive free or reduced meals. Every Wednesday, a local church brings in bread donations from the Panera restaurant chain, which the children are free to take home. On Fridays the kids start the weekend with bags of groceries provided through the United Way’s Backpack Program. Sometimes it isn’t enough, so we run our own food pantry to help families who run into emergencies.

Several years ago we transformed an unused space outside a kindergarten classroom into a vegetable garden. Through local grants and the tireless efforts of several teachers and our after-school coordinator, children helped plant and sow lettuce, chard, and cauliflower. We use the fruits of their labor in our school cafeteria and we send some home with the families who help keep the garden maintained.

 
Some of our families cannot afford to buy their children shoes. Seeing first graders shuffle around in adult-sized shoes is not uncommon. At the start of this school year, Kim, the assistant principal, stopped at a local Payless to buy a fifth- grader and her brother new shoes. The last time they got new shoes was when she and I took them to an Assistance League-sponsored shopping trip last March. I think these are the only times these children have had new shoes.

The emotional effects of poverty are more hidden, but no less insidious. Simply put, poverty hurts—physically and emotionally. With a school full of young children, we see a lot of separation anxiety, which our staff is well equipped to handle. But for deeper emotional trauma we seek outside help. When Nathan’s mother was battling cancer, I would fish him from her car and Kim or I would sit him in the office. Some days we could get him to class; other days we couldn’t. It was only after our case manager from the Building a Generation charity arranged counseling that his anxiety got better.

Families do what they need to survive. Often, this means doubling or even tripling up in a house. This creates a host of scenarios I never encountered as a solidly middle-class kid growing up. At the milder end, it means their children are left in the care of older siblings or roommates with whom families have banded together to pay rent. At the more extreme end, arguing or abuse in the home in one form or another can result. We work with students and parents who themselves are working through their varying levels of anxiety or depression or worse. Some families handle it well and others struggle. Some self-medicate.

I tell our teachers that we can’t control what happens at home, but we can control how we react to it. The first thing we remind each other is: “Don’t confuse issues of poverty with issues of morality.” Simple things like homework completion need to be viewed through that lens. Does the student have someone who can help her with her homework? Does she even have a place where she can work? More than a few teachers let students stay after school to do their homework. Every child needs a champion.

The daily encounters with our parents and students are as important as any academic, medical, or social service at our school. I am often outside at arrival and dismissal times. Not only is this a great way to welcome or say goodbye to students, it gives our parents easy access to the “person in charge.” For every sit-down meeting I’ve had with a parent I’ve had two curbside conferences. The level of familiarity is important. Not only does it relieve parents to know that I watch over their children, but it helps create a sense of community that everyone belongs here.

It’s easy to get lost in the enormity of the conditions in which we operate. Many of the problems, such as affordable housing and jobs with livable wages, are beyond our power to solve. However a sense of belonging is what gives us the tenacity to not only carry on but to help our students be resilient. Poverty makes it harder to succeed, but it is by no means an insurmountable barrier. Parents understand that we are on their side and their gratitude is evident every Teacher Appreciation Day when there is no shortage of flan, pan dulce, or tres leches cake for the staff.

The post A Hungry Child Cannot Learn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Merced is still a great place to raise a family because it has retained its small-town feel even while its population has grown to 90,000 people. And now we also have UC Merced and new amenities like the supermarket chains Raley’s, Costco and Smart & Final. I came back to Merced from San Diego because raising youngsters takes a village and my parents are here. Merced is my village.

Loving Merced isn’t easy for everyone. In April this year, an editorial in the Fresno Bee called us “California’s Murder Capital,” citing 93 homicides in the last four years, a per-capital murder rate twice the state average. Merced has extensive problems with gang violence. At the same time, the town is often described as boring, or “Merdead,” because some say it lacks culture, nightlife, and recreational opportunities one might find in the Bay Area. Merced was also hit very hard by the mortgage crisis, with many families losing their homes, which left the city struggling to balance its budget. Education, policing, and parks and recreation were in a battle for funding against other city services and workers’ pensions.

Over the years I’ve thought of moving but I ended up making a commitment to this place. And I’m glad I did. Merced has some of the most passionate, persistent, and positive people I’ve ever met. These are people who love their community and will do what it takes to keep everyone safe while finding ways for the community to prosper. Recently, I’ve felt my village change dramatically for the better. I feel it on my lunch hour and when I walk my dog (sometimes late at night).

Melissa Kelly-Ortega’s family.

A couple of times a week, my friend Heather Gonzalez and I take a walk. We start where I work at Central California Alliance for Health in the center of the city and walk south on Canal Street where we pass by a beautiful new mural painted by the Mariposa Art Company depicting Native American faces and symbols. Then we turn and walk to “M” Street to Childs Avenue and back up Canal so we can stop at the splash pad in McNamara Park to cool off before heading back to work.

I often imagine getting in shape by jogging during lunch, jumping in the pool at the park (for only a dollar) then going back to work. I haven’t done that yet, but I have jogged during lunch and done sit-ups under the falling water of the splash pad. It’s beautiful. Sometimes there will be families with kids playing in the water. Recently, I saw a gentleman taking his lunch break in the shade with his sports chair. Everyone is always very friendly and just enjoying the moment.

This experience is new. For quite a few years there wasn’t money to put water in the pool or make the necessary upgrades or keep it up. Through the collaborative work of community members, non-profits, and the city of Merced, McNamara Park received a $2.6 million upgrade which included the splash pad. The city also made the pool to be ADA accessible, replaced the inside of the pool and the liner, and hired lifeguards for the summer.

Others signs of renewal are the murals that have been popping up on buildings everywhere in Merced. The Mariposa Art Company began painting walls in South Merced, downtown, and most recently on the expansive walls of the Merced County Food Bank. With the help of Paint The Town and other community members who want to raise awareness of all the great things about Merced, murals are no longer expensive and unknown to the city. It is now much easier to get a mural than it was in years past.

We also have an outdoor Shakespeare Festival, a community theater, quarterly Art Hops where shops downtown show local artists’ work, and a twice-a-year Fashion and Art show called FAME: Fashion & Art—the Merced Experience. These are all projects created by residents. In Merced, you can do that!

Salsa garden in front of an auto body shop.

As for Merced’s reputation for being dangerous, I’ve never been afraid. I walk my dog between 10 p.m. and midnight and have never had any issues. I’m a middle-aged, short woman but I’ve walked South Merced as a community organizer, knocked on many doors, chatted with residents about their neighborhoods, and invited them to meetings. I’ve walked the “high density crime” areas with Feet Changing Lives, a group dedicated to stopping violence. Their motto is “Love Over Violence and Evil.”

Recently I helped a co-worker bring her car to an auto repair shop and we stumbled on a little garden on our way back to work. At first, it looked like weeds, but it smelled like tomatoes and then we really looked at what was growing in there: peppers, cherry tomatoes, and cilantro. It was extraordinary to see this salsa garden growing in the sidewalk outside an auto repair shop. There is a movement to create policy around front yard gardening within the city of Merced led by Brittany Oakes, the coordinator of Merced Local Food Project. In Merced, you can make the city into the kind of place that you want to live.

There are a few big things powering this change. One is that UC Merced, which arrived here in 2005, is really starting to engage with the city itself. There’s the Merced Venture Lab, the new Downtown Center and more foot traffic in Merced’s downtown. Some of the UC Merced and Merced community college graduates are now running for city council or have decided to make Merced their home, fighting the “brain drain” everyone talks about.

Secondly, there’s been a change in city government. Because of a lawsuit, the county is now having district elections for the first time, which should result in new faces representing their communities at the city level, which will bring new ideas and energy to our city. There has also been a push to reinvigorate the Youth Commission, which had been shut down for many years. An online tool called Opengov.com has made our city’s budget transparent and accessible to the community.

When I think of all the changes already in Merced, and all the people who’ve selflessly put in their time and love to make those changes, I get a little choked up. We all have the power to bring positive changes to our communities. By staying positive, being persistent and celebrating each other’s strengths and successes, our common vision for Merced will become a reality.

The post Merced Is My Village and It’s Looking Up appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The National Center for Early Childhood Health and Wellness has recognized how important it is to engage and educate entire families in their own health. Improving health literacy means helping parents become better health decision-makers for their children. I’ve seen this firsthand working with Head Start agencies across the nation as the research director of the UCLA Health Care Institute.

The UCLA Health Care Institute, founded in 2001, has developed a way to use business management principles to improve the health of families. What that means in practice is that we’ve changed the way Head Start staff are trained to do health promotion. Over many years, we’ve learned that it’s not enough to just provide accessible written materials to families. Instead, families change their behavior when they get live interactive training sessions with the familiar staff at their child’s Head Start school. Through such sessions, staffers can show them how much they care and want to support the children and their families.

This work on health is part of a journey that began over 25 years ago, when the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where my teaching and research focuses on data analysis and statistics, started a program to provide leadership and management training to Head Start executives. I find teaching the Head Start directors and managers, who come from all over the country, extremely gratifying. Head Start executives typically have backgrounds in early childhood education, but tend to be less familiar with the particulars of managing an organization efficiently.

In the year 2000, I conducted a survey asking 600 Head Start directors what major barriers the families they served faced relative to health. And I got the same answer from an overwhelming percentage of those surveyed and those barriers were huge. The survey found very low attendance at Head Start health education programs, and Head Start directors told me they didn’t have the right kind of materials and training for families on health. The health materials they gave families often ended up in the trash.

That led us to create the Health Care Institute and expand our mission to include helping Head Start agencies plan effective health education sessions. Head Start started by holding special fun and engaging health events to attract families. We also created new health materials focused on prevention at home. These materials were easier to understand (they were pitched at a third-grade reading level) and could be adapted to the wide variety of communities and cultures they serve.

We’ve refined and expanded that program in recent years. At first, our health education focused on how to prevent and respond to common childhood illnesses and injuries that can be big burdens on families. But we soon saw that many families and children were suffering from poor oral health and added oral health trainings—sometimes the parents didn’t know what to do, sometimes there were very few dentists who could provide them with service. We expanded our offerings to include obesity prevention and mental health, and developed webinars for staff and toolkits to use with parents.

So far, we’ve trained more than 120,000 families across all 50 states, and we want to reach many more. The staff have also personally benefited from the health information. Since 2011, we’ve been supported by a federal grant from the Office of Head Start, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

One of the challenges of working with a program like Head Start is that so many different people and communities are involved. Head Start serves a million children annually which means hundreds of thousands of families, in thousands of communities. Expanding the reach for health education meant a new way of thinking about organizing and communicating through the organization and assessing the impact.

We learned we had to train teams of Head Start staff first, bringing the personnel from different states into one place, while integrating health training with management training. This was not merely training, we wanted to create a culture of health and an agency shaped by caring. To do that, we had staffers participate as parents in mock parent-training sessions. Stepping into the parents’ shoes helped staff understand how to make the program more engaging for parents. Once engaged, they were able to learn and interact with other parents, further enhancing the learning and reinforcement. We’ve found that when parents get the right information in the right way, they really use it.

What’s the right way? Well, business school professors and data analysts don’t often talk about “love,” but I do. It means offering information in a way that shows real respect for people. When people feel respected and cared for, they are open to learning. L.O.V.E. is a trademarked acronym for the core belief of the training: listening, observing, valuing, and encouraging.

The success of the local training requires marketing. That may not be a word people like, but marketing, particularly internal marketing, is vital inside institutions, to get buy-in from all staff in the management training and health education, to assure good attendance by families, and thus to maximize impact.

We collect data. We’ve found that when families can better manage acute illnesses in their children they feel empowered. Among the data we’ve seen is that parents use the health system more appropriately after training—decreasing emergency room visits by 58 percent, for example. We’ve also seen an increase in the use of health resource materials at home, and a 29-percent decrease in the amount of school missed by children whose families receive the health education. Parents also showed a 42-percent decrease in work days missed after attending the trainings and learning how to manage illnesses in their children at home. This is an important benefit for families on limited income.

As it takes this research and these implementation strategies for prevention and applies them to the child care environment, Head Start has even more potential to improve the health of more children and adults in this country. It won’t be easy, but Head Start is moving in the right direction by engaging entire families in their own health and prevention. Improving health literacy opens the door for improving health in our communities.

The post Head Start Can Make Entire Families Healthier appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.