FIRST WORD
linger for years to come, as parents struggle to pay off debts and children suffer the consequences of persistent household stress.
programmes to make sure that that child is in a place where they are ready to go to school and learn,” Nielsen said. “There's no point paying for top-of-the-line intervention teachers if a child is coming home and hasn't slept all night, has bug bites everywhere, rats in the bedroom or is in an abuse situation. You have got to go home to something that represents a safe space for that child, with the basic needs met. We want water, food, a bed, bedding and safety for the child and the mum.” Nielsen’s vision is to expand the programme beyond George Town Primary to every elementary school in Cayman. Currently, ARK is working to reach students in West Bay, expanding MER to include 24 children and their siblings. The value of her ambition to reach low-income children across the Islands is backed by research. Studies have shown that early investment in children pays off for communities in the long term.
The Brain Science Behind Childhood Investment A MER kid and ARK Volunteer
The charity’s work has already transformed countless lives through its efforts to remodel unfit homes and to mentor schoolaged children. The Covid-19 crisis, however, has rapidly multiplied the need for immediate assistance, and ARK has more demand than it has capacity. She describes the extreme poverty lived by many ARK clients – situations where food, shelter and other supports are chronically lacking – as a trauma. The daily anxiety of making ends meet has a lasting impact on mental health, increasing incidents of depression, domestic violence and even suicide attempts. Nielsen sees the desperation every day. Families struggling to meet basic needs for housing and food have little capacity to address much else, Nielsen explained. “It takes a lot to be a really good parent and you need a great deal of things to be going right. You need a lot of support, positivity and consistency,” she said. “When you take all of those things out from underneath the [family] … it's very difficult to be the type of parent that's going to attend to the emotional, physical, mental wellbeing of a child.”
Cost-benefit analysis of well-designed, early childhood intervention programmes has shown that every dollar invested results in $1.80 to $17.07 in return to society, according to the RAND Corporation – an American non-profit global policy think tank. The best returns come from programmes that include home visits and parent education, combined with good quality early childhood education. These interventions result in better academic achievement, improved behaviour, greater success in the labour market and lower rates of delinquency and crime.
Dr. Erica Lam, a trauma and attachment specialist with Aspire, explains that many of the benefits of early intervention come down to brain development. By the time children reach age four to five, their brains have already developed to around 90% of their adult volume. This means that before a child has even entered kindergarten – or qualified for many of the early intervention programmes currently available to low-income families in Cayman – their brains have already been wired in ways that will guide their temperament, their ability to selfregulate emotions and behaviours, and their language and thinking skills.
The things she and her team have witnessed in the most impoverished corners of Cayman are “chilling”, she says. But she remains a true believer, that such suffering is preventable, if only enough support could be generated in the community. ARK’s school programme, Mentor-Educate-Reinforce (MER), seeks to change the trajectory of young lives with early, holistic intervention. With sponsorship of $5,000-$7,000 a year, the programme is first able to produce a psychoeducational report to identify a child’s individual needs and adapt tools to get their learning on track. Then, ARK tackles the home environment by going in and performing renovations to ensure each child has a safe, suitable place to rest and restore. “We use all of our 20
Cayman Parent Magazine | First Word
Tara Nielsen, Director of ARK
