Nurturing the heart for lifelong results

By Zenaida Serrano Espanol
Advertiser Staff Writer

Illustration by Jon Orque • The Honolulu Advertiser

That was among the messages emphasized at the Symposium on Early Childhood and Health Development, held Monday to Thursday at the Hawai'i Imin International Conference Center at the East-West Center.

Dr. Calvin Sia, co-chairman of the event and professor with the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Hawai'i John A. Burns School of Medicine, said that over the years, he has "seen the problems of neglected children, abused children, and the 'cycle of rotten outcomes' ... school dropouts, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancies, welfare dependency and the whole vicious cycle repeating itself.

"We want to break the cycle," he said.

And families, the experts say, can play a bigger role than they often realize in changing that trend.

Before the symposium, Michael Levine — the executive director of the I Am Your Child Foundation based in New York and Los Angeles, and a guest speaker at the event — said in an interview that while there has been a lot of attention from childcare professionals paid to brain development and healthy physical development of young children, "this conference and other conferences are beginning to emphasize the social and the emotional (development) of families and young children."

The I Am Your Child Foundation is dedicated to promoting public awareness about and new investments in meeting the needs of families with very young children, Levine said.

The four-day symposium was geared mainly toward physicians and professionals specializing in pediatrics or childcare. But in the interview, Levine also offered advice for parents on how they can help promote warmheartedness — nonviolent, generous and caring behavior — in young children.

"The best piece of advice I have is, parents need to follow their very good instincts, which include loving their children a whole lot, spending time to interact (with them) and to create a powerful bond," he said.

This includes holding and rocking the infant gently; singing; playing simple games with the baby such as "peek-a-boo"; and talking to the child in calm, conversational tones, Levine said.

He added that he believes breast-feeding is important not only because it promotes the baby's physical health, but because it helps create a very important bond between the child and the mother.

For parents of children in the toddler and preschool stages, Levine recommends storytelling; sharing with the child stories about the family's culture, language and traditions to help create a strong identity for that child; and encouraging social interaction between the child and his or her peers to learn things like sharing and taking turns.

"The main thing is the interaction between at least one caring adult who is absolutely crazy about that child and shows it in all sorts of different ways," Levine said.

But if the parents' own upbringing "was a little hazardous or was a little shaky," Sia said, these parents should take advantage of government and private programs for families, which may help them to raise and nurture their children better.

The University of Hawai'i sponsored the symposium along with Aprica Childcare Institute of Osaka, Japan, whose mission is to break new ground in its quest to "listen" to infants and understand their needs. UH and the institute presented this new Childcare Summer Institute program in recognizing the importance of raising warmhearted children and furthering the cross-cultural understanding of childcare science and child nurturing.

Over a dozen guest speakers from Hawai'i, the Mainland and Japan presented lectures on topics that included: "Principles of Childcare," "Bonding," "Engineering to Promote Child Safety," and "Cross-Cultural Childcare and Development."

It was the first of three planned annual four-day summer symposiums "with the intent to promote this movement called 'Nurturing the Heart,'" said Dr. Louise Iwaishi, president of the Hawai'i Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The university and the institute hope to eventually establish a childcare research institute at UH, Iwaishi said. "There is a vision that there is a need for, and plans to establish a childcare research institute based on an ... interdisciplinary training kind of approach," she said. "The expectation is it would have all the resources of the variety of schools (in the UH system) and the community colleges."

Reach Zenaida Serrano Espanol at zespanol@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-8174.