The Problems of Youth

We don't have time to go into detail about your work on children and your book, Today's Children. But I'm curious: are you more sanguine now about our society's commitment to addressing the immense array of problems that have troubled the situation of young people?

Yes I am. There's still a long way to go, and maybe you have to be optimistic when you tackle very hard, almost intractable problems as I do habitually. But still, if you just take concretely one case in Today's Children, in my years at Carnegie we focused very heavily on two periods because they're crucially formative and associated with high vulnerability but great potentiality. One is 0-3, conception to three. Dr. Hamburg and Hillary Rodham Clinton And the other is early adolescence, 10-14. And if you take 0-3, it has simply come alive. And I'm proud to say, perhaps delusionally, that we had something to do with that. There are many other factors, but the situation today is so much better than it was even ten years ago, even five years ago, in 0-3. There's a tremendous amount of interest. Just before I came here I saw the National Governor's Association on C-SPAN and time after time in recent years, every meeting really focuses on 0-3. They have a multiplicity of initiatives. I've had the privilege of addressing the National Governor's Association several times. There have been several White House conferences which I've had the privilege to participate in. There have been national television specials; particularly Rob Reiner has spearheaded a whole media campaign drawing on the scientific and medical information. We have a ferment in the country, many magazine articles, newspaper coverage. That was a very quiet, if not dead, subject ten years ago. And it's a very live subject today; all kinds of initiatives are taking place. The business community has come alive on 0-3. So there is at least a decent fighting chance that our youngest children will have a new set of opportunities, a real configuration of possibilities, beyond anything I could have imagined ten years ago.

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