This is a year-old article that I stumbled across while doing some research today. It’s about how important the first two years of your life are to brain development. It talks about day care centers where the workers aren’t trained to stimulate the babies’ sense (at one, a researcher found all the infants strapped into car seats watching a movie) and how children raised in orphanages develop an array of developmental problems. It’s… it’s not a super fun read.

But it’s an important one. The most interesting stuff, to me, came on the last page of the article, when it talked about an initiative to send nurses and doulas to teach new mothers (particularly low-income and teen moms) and daycare workers ways to better care for their baby. The results were pretty astounding:

When the RAND Corporation evaluated the initiative, it determined that the program would save between $1.26 and $5.70 for every $1 spent, with the higher savings from the higher-risk families, thanks to reduced spending on hospitals, incarceration, and cash assistance. 

And according to Timothy Bartik, an economist and author of Investing in Kids, every dollar that goes into the Nurse-Family Partnership will raise incomes for the entire population by $1.85, once you factor the economic benefits of a more productive workforce—and a tax base that won’t be so strained picking up the tab for remediation and crime. High-functioning day care centers that cover birth through age five, Bartik says, produce a larger payoff per dollar: $2.25.

And it just boggles my mind. It makes me sad - legitimately, personally sad - to think that we as a country could SAVE money in the long run by investing in subsidized daycare centers and assistance for young parents, but we don’t. The wealthiest people on our country balk at paying four percent more in taxes while infants’ and toddlers’ brains rot. When the government tries to balance the budget, they first look to cuts, even though many government-funded programs ultimately save the government money. But our politicians don’t give a shit, because teen mothers aren’t the ones signing campaign donation checks. They want the up-front benefit of saying, “Hey, we’re being so responsible by cutting spending!” instead of the long-term investment of giving your community the resources they need to thrive and ultimately not need government assistance programs.

It’s sickening. It’s sad, and it’s sickening, and it makes me want to march down to DC and personally visit every single Congressional representative and explain this to them until they either agree to do this basic stuff or break down and admit they’ve sold out their constituency for their donors.