December 18, 2024
While the holiday season is a time to connect with family, friends, and community, Common Ground Health’s Healthi Kids Coalition is highlighting one particular type of love for its power to transform lives. Launching today, the “Love from the Start” campaign brings awareness to the idea that love and support from even one primary caregiver is a crucial factor in protecting infants and toddlers from trauma, increasing the likelihood that children will achieve their full potential.
"Ninety percent of all human brain development happens during the first five years of a child's life,” said Stephanie David, JD, MPH, IMH-E®, early childhood policy director at Common Ground Health. “The single most important ingredient for that development is loving, supportive, and responsive relationships with their parent or primary caregiver. Babies and young children need love to thrive, and those early, nurturing relationships set the foundation for lifelong physical, mental, and cognitive health and wellbeing.”
The Love from the Start campaign underscores the significance of infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH). It emphasizes the vital role of warm, loving interactions in fostering confidence, resilience, and healthy growth from birth through age five. Healthi Kids aims to increase public awareness of the importance of early relationships through advertising on billboards, public transit, social media, online, and through media interviews.
The campaign, which is in English and Spanish, will reach the nine-county Finger Lakes region of Monroe, Livingston, Ontario, Wayne, Seneca, Schuyler, Steuben, Chemung, and Yates counties.
“Our goal is to reach primary caregivers including parents, guardians, and grandparents,” explained David. “We also want to reach and influence adults who serve young children and families in a professional setting such as early care and education, pediatrics, early intervention, family court, and social services.”
“Babies and young children develop through relationships with the grownups that care about them, including professionals,” said Sarah Fitzgibbons, Ed.D. LMHC, MT-BC, IMH-E®, Vice President of Programs & Practices at the Society for the Protection and Care of Children in Rochester. “Building a community of professionals who can support infants and young children in the context of their caregivers, families, communities and cultures, will significantly positively impact the lifelong health of generations to come.”
Healthi Kids developed this campaign as part of a broader community collaboration called Project LAUNCH, aimed at promoting the healthy social emotional development and well-being of young children across settings. “Through developmental screening, education and training in infant and early childhood mental health, and partnerships between behavioral and physical health providers, LAUNCH strives to ensure children’s healthy development and builds the capacity of the adults that surround them," said Sarah Boorsma, co-project director of Project LAUNCH at Children’s Institute in Rochester, which oversees the collaboration.
Healthi Kids developed the images, colors and phrases for the campaign with the input of local family members with young children. Parents also gave input for the messaging of the campaign and its focus on early relationships.
“This campaign means a lot to me because I know how important it is for kids, from their earliest years, to feel loved and supported,” said Jamie Lee Maldonado, a parent member of the Healthi Kids coalition. “Growing up, I didn’t often have that support, and it affected how I saw myself and trusted others. Now, as a parent, I want to make sure my kids – and every kid – feel cared for, understood, and secure and that they don't go through the hardships I went through. I want to break that chain of abuse and neglect for the next generation.”
Resources to Help Build Strong Children
Frederick Douglass famously stated, "It’s easier to build strong children than to fix broken men.” The Love from the Start campaign seeks to address the logical follow-up question: "What does it take to build strong children?”
LoveFromTheStart.org features a robust resource library for parents, caregivers, and community members to learn how to nurture children's mental health during the all-important first five years.
Love from the Start encourages parents and caregivers to use everyday moments to connect with their young children such as responding to a baby’s first sounds, playing peekaboo, and splashing together during bath time.
“We have known for a long time that early experiences matter for our whole lives,” said Kenya Malcolm, PhD, IECMH-E® clinical psychologist, associate professor and director, Infant & Early Childhood Initiatives, UR Medicine Department of Psychiatry. “The relationships babies and toddlers have drive how they learn and develop, for better and for worse. IECMH is not only about ‘mental health treatments.’ It is a way of always considering the baby’s experience and focusing on strengthening those relationships to provide the best supports for young children and their important others.”
The campaign website features information about how parents and family caregivers can take action to build early relationships with their children. Healthi Kids will also host webinars and in-person events in 2025 to provide space for deeper discussions and learning about infant and early childhood mental health.
Love from the Start is made possible through funding from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation and the Greater Rochester Health Foundation. To learn more about the campaign, please visit LoveFromTheStart.org.
About Healthi Kids
The Healthi Kids Coalition is an initiative of Common Ground Health. Led by a community coalition, we advocate for policies, systems, environments, and resources that advance the health and well-being of all children birth to age 8, and their families, in Rochester and the Finger Lakes region. Learn more at HealthiKids.org.