From the Field – Page 2 – Families and Work Institute

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

A Seismic Shift: Economic Policy is Child Development Policy

By Ellen Galinsky & Elyse Rowe

From the Field, News & Updates

Dr. Aber is an advisor to Mind in the Making and Bezos Family Foundation’s other early learning program, Vroom. He has been a tireless advocate and researcher on poverty-reduction strategies for more than three decades. He was also on the 15-person panel that advised on the groundbreaking 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics report: A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty.

On March 11, the American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law. Several elements of this time-limited legislation have been widely heralded as having the potential to cut child poverty in half. Within the bill, the 2021 Child Tax Credit provisions have been described as a “revolutionary in the way the U.S. government regards minors.” In short, this law:

Increases the maximum annual credit from $2,000 per child under 17 to $3,000 per child (under 18) or $3,600 (children younger than 6) for 2021.
Makes the credit fully refundable. While the 2020 tax credit was partially refundable (the credit offset taxpayers’ tax liability), the 2021 credit is fully refundable. This means the credits can take tax liability below zero and this amount is refunded in cash to the taxpayer.
Advance funds to eligible taxpayers on a monthly basis rather than at the end of the year.

To learn more about the research behind this approach, Elyse Rowe, director of communications and Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer at the Bezos Family Foundation sat down with internationally recognized expert in child development and social policy, Dr. Lawrence Aber of New York University. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Aber previously served as director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University and was part of the panel for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics groundbreaking 2019 report: A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, which was instrumental to the passage of 2021 Child Tax Credit provisions. He’s also an advisor for Bezos Family Foundation’s early learning programs.

Question: You have researched issues related to child poverty for over 30 years. Can you tell us about the role research has played in supporting this new policy approach?

Back in the mid-1990’s, when I was the Director of the National Center for Children and Poverty, one could only dream of drawing upon a set of clear and strongly evidence-based policy ideas that could actually improve the problem of childhood poverty dramatically.

Since then, there’ve been hundreds of researchers in the country, myself included, who have been working on this in one way or another. These studies included: 1) descriptive, “accounting“ studies showing that investments can actually lead to, or at least be associated with, poverty reductions; 2) studies of the effects of poverty on the developing brain, and 3) causal studies showing that if you reduce child poverty, you improve kids’ health and development. It took 25 or 30 years of persistent work to accumulate this kind of research base.

Question: Tell us about the studies you conducted.

I’ve done random assignment experiments testing poverty-reduction strategies like conditional cash transfers, on family income, family poverty and on children’s development. We found that if we reduce poverty, we can improve children’s development. I’ve also done descriptive studies identifying several potential pathways by which low family income and high material hardship affect children’s health and development. We found, for example, that family stress links material hardship to adverse social-emotional outcomes and that family investments link low-income to adverse cognitive and academic outcomes.

These and many other studies in the fields of developmental science, social science, behavioral science, policy science, economics, communication science as well as decades of policy experimentation laid the groundwork so that the National Academies of Sciences consensus report could be written.

Question: You were part of the 15-member expert panel authoring this report. Tell us about its findings.

It basically found three things: The first is that poverty causes child health and development problems. CAUSES. It is not just a correlation. That is a huge scientific conclusion.

Second, we found that current policies reduce child poverty. But you have to measure child poverty in a different, more accurate way than the method used for decades, the “official poverty measure”. The new, more accurate “supplemental poverty measure” takes into account the benefits received by families and the expenses they had to pay like health insurance and child care.

The third thing we found was that the nation could create packages of policy proposals that reduced child poverty and had a positive effect on employment among low-income workers. Historically and politically, some researchers and policy makers made the argument that if you increase cash benefits to families, they’ll quit working. No, they won’t; not if you implement the right packages of policies.

In addition, the National Academies of Sciences report found that if you give families a tax relief credit or allowance per child on a monthly basis, families do not spend this new income on “vices”. Rather, they spend the money on things like food, rent and not accumulating debt. It is income instability, as much as low income, that is damaging to families. With a lump sum paid annually, it is used productively to pay off big debts and/or to make purchases of durable goods that are very expensive, like a new refrigerator or perhaps now, for internet access for their children. The consistent monthly payments, I think, are better for reducing family stress.

Question: Besides the strong evidence base, what other factors may have helped move this policy forward?

I think the last year has shown that an enormous number of people, through no fault of their own, are vulnerable to shocks that turn over their life, their family’s life, and their community’s life. So many people have been driven into poverty through no fault of their own. The pandemic and the resulting economic crises are exogenous to them; they are not caused by them. This seems to have changed the moral calculus for some people about supporting families and communities under severe economic stress.

Question: In a sentence or two, what should families and other people know about this?

Families should know this is a program to especially help people with lower incomes, but it is also a program to help middle-income families too. So, the fact that eligibility for the child tax credit goes up to $75,000 (for single parents or couples earning up to $150,000) before starting to fade out covers the vast majority of families with kids. The child tax credit is the single biggest anti-poverty tool in the new policy, but improvements in SNAP and child care support, and increases in the earned income tax credit and housing subsidies—these are going to have important anti-poverty effects, too.

Question: Now that the law is passed, what comes next?

Job one is optimal and equitable implementation so everybody who is eligible for these benefits gets them.

Planning for making the provisions permanent is job two. These first two jobs are places where philanthropic and advocacy efforts can play a role.

Third, we should not use lifting some children above the poverty line as the only indicator of success. We also have clear evidence from our report that some of these policies do a better job of lifting kids out of deep poverty than they do out of poverty, and other policies should be considered to help families move from near poverty into self-sufficient, economically stable households.

Fourth and finally, by order of Congress, the report focused solely on strategies that could reduce child poverty within 10 years. There are other strategies, like investments in early childhood and improving school achievement—meritorious in their own rights—that could be seen as part of a longer-term child poverty reduction strategy.

Question: A year from now, what would you hope to see?

I would hope that Americans experience the implementation of a child tax credit as something that is good for the whole nation—not only for kids and families experiencing poverty. And that we continue to see consolidation of the notion that poverty is affected by big exogenous factors that can happen to any of us or any community, albeit with differential effects. I hope we are solidifying our commitment to strategies that offer a form of social protection against those big exogenous forces, and that the provisions either become permanent or get negotiated so that they are not degraded, but gain broader political support and are implemented.

This involves an ideological shift in the philosophy of public policy. The child tax credit, the child poverty reduction provisions, are both a contributor and a benefactor to that ideological shift.

I hope that we become more evidence-based in our policy debates, but also consistent with a different moral and ethics, too. It is not just the science; it’s the science interpreted in the context of certain human and social values that are critical.

Dr. Lawrence Aber

August 23, 2025August 24, 2025

Darlene Clemens: A Champion for Science Nurtures an Early Learning Community

By Linda Shockley

Community Engagement, From the Field

Becoming a community champion for science was not what Dr. Darlene Clemens of Port Angeles, WA, envisioned when she retired from a successful 36-year career as a teacher and a principal. “I was going to learn French; I was going to learn how to play the piano and travel,” she said.

Her plans began to change in 2013, when Clemens wrote a letter to Ellen Galinsky, author of Mind in the Making: Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. And so began a five-year correspondence with the then-stranger Galinsky affectionately now calls, “Dear Darlene.”

Galinsky describes how it happened:

In 2013, I received a letter from someone I didn’t know. She wrote, “My name is Darlene Clemens and I want to use your book Mind in the Making as a resource to the families and professionals in northwestern Washington State.”

Of course, I was thrilled. I have always likened writing and publishing a book to casting it into a dark sea. You never know where, when or even if it will bob up. Of course, all authors hope their books will make a difference.

In 2014, I heard from Darlene again. This time, I was more than thrilled: I was inspired. As the consummate educator, Darlene, along with her husband, Michael, accomplished something creative, fun and very sharable by organizing the Mind in the Making book into 93 practical mini-messages. These tips are sent every Monday morning to more than 1,300 parents and teachers in the Port Angeles public schools.

Because Clemens believes so strongly that research should lead to action, her work with the Mind in the Making (MITM) program has sparked other work in the schools. In the Jefferson Elementary School, the Mind in the Making booklists that promote skills are displayed on a bulletin board created by the school counselor, Vicki Rockholt, and children actively select skills in themselves to promote.

In the Roosevelt Elementary School, Principal Michelle Olsen, promotes brain-based instruction and trauma-informed practices, including a space where children who are feeling stressed can recover, learn how to self-regulate and develop life skills.

In October 2018, Galinsky traveled to Washington State to meet Darlene and Michael Clemens, to see the work in action, and to make presentations to families and professionals in this burgeoning early learning community.

Over a recent pancake breakfast with Darlene and Michael Clemens in lovely Port Angeles, Galinsky and Darlene discussed the beginnings of this early childhood initiative.

Galinsky: How did you find my book?

Clemens: I discovered Mind in the Making through Norma Turner. Norma’s an activist and has done wonderful things in the community. She started an organization called Prevention Works! that purchased 100 copies of Mind in the Making and gathered all kinds of people in the community to read them. And then we got together in small groups to discuss it. As I’m sitting at my house reading Mind in the Making — I was barely into it — but it was like “Where was this book when I was raising my kids?” So I just started outlining it because I knew I had to do something with it. I just didn’t know what.”

Galinsky (laughing): And that “what” became your need to synthesis the science of early learning into life skills available to parents and others who interact with children.

Clemens: Yes, in a letter to the community, I wrote: “Because I know how busy your lives are and how little time you have for reading an entire book, my husband and I divided the book into 93 mini-messages for you.”

Galinsky: This is brilliant. So you’ve completed this remarkable synthesis. What was the next challenge?

Clemens: Well, we needed a way to get the mini-messages out into the community. Since my background is in education, we began with the school system.In March 2014, I started attending school events again. I went to all of the Parent Teacher Organization meetings. I went to all the teacher-staff meetings. We have an event called Kids Fest in the early winter where parents bring their children, and I went there.

We started an e-list and organized it into groups: for families and for professionals. We have also created lists by children’s age, including babies, which led to creating a booklet just for babies that we distribute throughout the community. We also make bookmarks.

Galinsky: And now, four years later, are you still attending all these meetings and events?

Clemens: No, we no longer have to do that. This initiative has become part of the community fabric. Each fall, when the kindergarten teachers meet with parents, they sign them up to get the messages so all I have to do is add the new subscribers to our list.

Galinsky: Have you heard from people who use the tips?

Clemens: Yes, which is always gratifying. For example, a father recounted how his baby was crying hysterically and he couldn’t calm him down. He walked the baby over to the light switch — a suggestion from the mini-messages to promote the skill of focus — and the baby stopped crying right away!”

Want to start your week by receiving Darlene and Michael Clemens’ mini-messages each Monday morning? Contact: Dr.DarleneClemens@olypen.com

Additional Information In addition to their mini-messages work, Darlene and Michael began alerting families and professionals to the resources that the MITM program has created, along with Vroom resources, including:

First Book — a MITM library of children’s books with free tips on how to read them in ways that promote life skills

Skill-Building Opportunities — downloadable tip sheets that show how to turn challenging times (like parents who disagree on child rearing or screen time) into opportunities to promote life skills; and

Vroom — the Bezos Family Foundation program that offers 1000+ tips that turn the time parents already have with their children into brain-building moments.

Photo: Vicki Rockholt, a counselor at Jefferson Elementary School, Ellen Galinsky and Darlene Clemens take a break in front of the Mind in the Making bulletin board. Children actively select skills to promote in themselves. (Photograph by Michael Clemens)

Reprinted from Early Learning Nation

August 23, 2025August 24, 2025

Why Don’t We Just Do That?

By K.C. Compton

Community Engagement, From the Field

Three years ago, Amanda and John Horne, owners of Anna Maria Oyster Bar in Bradenton, Florida, heard that 51 percent of children in their local Manatee County school system couldn’t read at grade level by third grade. They were appalled.

“This was horrific,” Amanda says. “We had no idea that this was an issue.” Over cocktails one night, Amanda and John wondered what they could do. Their clientele is largely composed of older “grandparent-type” people. They have four restaurants and a mailing list of more than 24,000 customers. What if they could pair children up with a grandparent figure or somebody who cares about them, read with them and maybe instill them with a love of reading?

They have four restaurants and a mailing list of more than 24,000 customers. What if they could pair children up with a grandparent figure or somebody who cares about them, read with them and maybe instill them with a love of reading?

“And as the cocktails carried on, it was like, ‘Why don’t we just do that?’” she says with a laugh. Thus, in 2017, Dive Into Reading launched in partnership with the School District of Manatee County, the library system and the Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading.

The Hornes designed the program with a simple premise: bring the children and mentors in for a hot breakfast and get them reading. Many of the children have not been exposed to basic life skills, so along with reading, they learn table manners, how to order from a menu or how to select items from a buffet.

“They come to us once a week for the four weeks of summer school and we do our best to pair them up with the same mentor every week. We want the mentors to know that it matters to the kids that an adult is actually spending two solid hours with them one-on-one.”

Amanda attended the Mind in the Making workshops offered by the SCGLR and loved learning how children’s brains work. She and John now require each mentor to attend a 1.5-hour training for which The Patterson Foundation provided two Mind in the Making trainers. The mentors have said the training makes them more comfortable with the children and confident that their interactions can actually help the children grow stronger in their ability to think and the life skills that will help them be successful.

The Hornes give each child in their program a special T-shirt that entitles them to come into any of their restaurants at any point during the next year and have a free meal. They also provide the children with gift certificates so they can bring a caregiver with them and show off what they’ve been learning. Partnering with the Early Learning Coalition of Manatee County, each of the Hornes’ restaurants now provides a book nook where the kids can read during dinner and then take a book home with them. And in partnership with other community organizations, at the end of the four-week session, each child receives a backpack filled with school supplies.

Amanda is proud of their accomplishment, which earned their restaurants the 2019 National Restaurant Association Education Foundation’s Restaurant Neighbor Award. However, in creating the program, they both have learned how much remains to be done. Many of the children face persistent hunger, for instance, and that’s not all right with the two restaurateurs. And then there are those six weeks between the end of their summer program and the beginning of school.

“What are they doing for those six weeks? I bet they aren’t reading,” she says. “We want them to be reading.”

The kids were proud and excited to receive their bracelets as rewards for reading, courtesy of the Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading “Dive Into Reading” Milestones

Launched in 2017 with 76 children and 54 mentors in Manatee County. After the first summer’s program, the school district tested the children and found they had gained 1.25 months of reading skill over the summer.
Expanded by June 2019 to all four Anna Maria Oyster Bar locations, The Bishop Museum of Science & Nature and has now expanded to Sarasota County, thanks to a partnership with Gecko’s Grill & Pub and the Sarasota County School District.
Communities now comprise 11 schools, seven teacher coordinators and 354 mentors who served a total of 3,487 hours to help 365 students read a total of 13,730 books.
Partnerships/Collaboration: The program has had support from the Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, school district and numerous philanthropic and service organization

RESOURCES:

Mobilizing Communities So All Children Make the Grade Pop Up Neighbor events, community, collaboration, mobilization

“Community Cultivators” Shared Values, Different Stories: Logan Smalley’s Vision for Building Community

Meeting (and Teaching) Families in Unexpected Places Grocery stores, bus stops, laundromats… what’s next?

Let’s Create An Early Learning Community Wait, What’s an Early Learning Community?

Reprinted with permission from Early Learning Nation.

August 23, 2025August 24, 2025

Mind in the Making: 10 Years of Keeping the Fire Burning in Children’s Eyes

By K.C Compton

Community Engagement, From the Field, News & Updates

Not all adventurers wear rugged clothes and pith helmets; some carry laptops, notebooks and pens. But all are driven by the same impulse: They have a question and they won’t rest until they have an answer that satisfies them. “What’s over that mountain?” “Where does this river go?”

In the case for Ellen Galinsky, author of more than 100 books and reports and a self-described “research adventurer,” the driving question in 2000 was, “How do we keep the fire burning in children’s eyes?”

Some people like their adventure exploring uncharted territory, Galinsky says, but for her, research into critical societal questions is the call of the wild. Twenty years ago, she was doing field research in preparation for a study on youth and learning when she discovered that while kids from the sixth through 12th grade could talk at length about “not learning,” few could talk with much passion or insight about times when they were learning.

“I interviewed incredible groups of children representing all kinds of diversity,” Galinsky says. “Children from low-income, high-income and middle-income families, from public and private schools, charter schools, living in inner cities, suburbs, rural areas. Across the board, few of them had a real excitement about learning. There weren’t really engaged in learning.”

Knowing that babies are born learning—wanting to see, to taste, to touch, to explore their worlds—Galinsky was haunted by the question, “What happened to that fire?”

For 10 years, she and her colleagues, including award-winning filmmakers from New Screen Concepts, pursued that inquiry by interviewing and filming leading child development researchers. After a few years, she began to see common threads not only in what sapped children’s engagement in learning, but also in the elements that fostered it. These findings were called by different names in different fields, but Galinsky’s training as a researcher and passion for conducting studies led her to recognize unmistakable patterns.

Out of her analysis of the work of nearly 100 researchers, she saw the importance of the “how of learning”—how a certain set of brain functions help people thrive and learn. The even better news she observed is that these brain functions (called executive functions) involve skills that can be developed and nurtured.

In 2010, this inquiry became a pioneering book—”Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs”—that has become a staple for teachers, parents, pediatricians and anyone with a personal interest in early childhood. As Drs. Spock and T. Berry Brazelton were to previous generations, Galinsky’s “Mind in the Making” is a seminal resource for those wanting to see children do well in the world.

The engine of “Mind in the Making’s” success is not only its rock-solid research, but its conversational, relatable language, filled with storytelling, individual examples and questions designed to provoke thought and discussion. Galinsky’s foundation as a teacher and educator (25 years on the faculty of the prestigious Bank Street College of Education before co-founding Families and Work Institute) shows in her personable, playful approach to the information, written in a way that doesn’t guilt-trip families and professionals but leads them into a thoughtful consideration of the ideas she’s presenting.

While Galinsky might have paused to take a deep, relieved breath once she had finished writing the book, she knew this was the starting point, not the finish line.

“Even after the decade of research, it takes nine months to birth a book,” she says. “After I got through the nitty gritty part of writing and with my colleagues, checking, double-checking and triple-checking the footnotes and quotes, I sent the manuscript out to 20 to 30 people I really admired. I was terrified, totally terrified, because I had taken their research and woven it into a larger theory and I worried that they might not like it. But I also wanted to figure out with them and others how we could turn this theory and the research behind it into action.”

To her great relief, the responses were “incredibly positive.” From that starting point, “Mind in the Making” became as much a movement as a book.

“I didn’t want this to be a book that just sat on the shelf,” Galinsky says. “I wanted the knowledge to be useful and usable for people. I wanted to put forth a common language that people could use to understand behavior in systematic ways. And I wanted this to be knowledge people could act on.”

Take a Deep Dive into MITM!

Explore the Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.
Turn challenging moments into brain-building occasions with MITM Skill-Building Opportunities.
Have fun with MITM Skill-Building Book Tips.
Check out Training opportunities

“As soon as the book was published, my colleagues and I were doing 100 things with ‘Mind in the Making,’” she says. “At Families and Work Institute (the non-profit she co-founded in 1989), we raised funds from 23 foundations to create materials—a series of videos called Experiments in Children’s Learning, Book Tips in partnership with First Book and Skill Building Opportunities—tip sheets on turning discipline issues into opportunities to promote life skills. With funds from the Kellogg Foundation and others, we developed learning modules for community leaders and then with additional funding, adapted them for museum and library educators and for healthcare professionals. We also gave small grants to people in communities all over the country who were already using Mind in the Making for projects to expand their impact.”

In 2016, Mind in the Making became a program of the Bezos Family Foundation to share the science of children’s learning even further through in-depth training and action-oriented materials. At the Foundation, where Galinsky served as Chief Science Officer, the Mind in the Making team—including Erin Ramsey, Jennie Portnof, Marline Griffith and Brandon Almy—continued to create new materials. Importantly, they created online Modules with Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington.

Galinsky says the dog-eared, scribbled on copies of her book, filled with Post-Its and marginalia make her happy. “It feels as if the reader and I have had a conversation. She continues, “When you write a book, it’s a very solitary activity. It doesn’t take a quarantine to quarantine anyone who’s writing a book. So, seeing the way people are actually using the book is gratifying. And the fact that we’ve reached the 10th anniversary is simply incredible to me.”

Significant Impact: Getting the Science off the Shelf and Into the Hands of Users

One of the first big impacts of the book was that the National Association for the Education of Young Children obtained the rights to publish 25,000 copies of “Mind in the Making” for teachers. A second big impact was a partnership with the Institute for Educational Leadership in implementing training and sharing materials with community schools in six different parts of the country.

“Teachers and principals don’t necessarily learn child development information,” she says. “They learn a lot about pedagogy (the principles and methods of instruction), but they learn less about child development. And they want that—they want to know why children act and develop the way they do. So, we found this huge resonance for ‘Mind in the Making’ in schools.”

“There are wonderful repercussions of our work with community schools,” she says. One repercussion was meeting Erin Ramsey who had been overseeing the Mind in the Making work in Evansville, IN. Ramsey joined the Mind in the Making team in 2012. “Erin is one of the most talented trainers and materials-creators I have ever met,“ says Galinsky.

Ready to Learn Providence

Another repercussion was a U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation grant to Ready to Learn Providence that expanded their community school work. Through this grant, Ready to Learn brought Mind in the Making, (which they describe as “a powerful learning experience for adults about how young children develop executive function skills”) to all 22 elementary schools in Providence, training close to 2000 mothers, fathers, grandparents and other family members, and more than 400 professionals.

“Mind in the Making was a transformative experience for so many members of the Providence school community,” says Leslie Gell, Director of Ready to Learn Providence. “Over our four-year project, external evaluators found that families reported significantly less authoritarian views toward parenting, which research shows leads to higher executive function skills in children. They also found that parents reported more positive views about the importance of their involvement in the schools, expressed more confidence in their ability to help and support their children in school, and reported growth in the social, emotional and cognitive development of their children.”

Mount Sinai Parenting Center

In 2019, the Mount Sinai Parenting Center in NYC, in collaboration with the Mind in the Making team, released Keystones of Development Curriculum, a curriculum they had worked on together for a number of years. This online curriculum for pediatric residents shows how to promote brain development and strengthen parent-child relationships within routine well-child visits. Dr. Carrie Quinn, Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Parenting Center, just announced that 101 programs, 2800 residents, 641 faculty members and 298 champions are now enrolled—reaching almost half of all of the pediatric residency programs in the United States!

National Head Start Association

The Mind in the Making and Vroom teams at the Bezos Family Foundation are especially proud of their collaboration with the National Head Start Start Association. “We have a dream of creating a Mind in the Making Nation,” says Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association. “In Head Start’s 55th year of getting children ready for school and life, we will accelerate and scale the awareness and impact of strategies for promoting executive functioning among Head Start’s more than 270,000 staff members across 1,600 grantees in communities across the country.”

Ellen Galinsky discusses how a focus on “trauma informed care” in early learning is shifting to “asset informed care.” And that process starts with looking at children in terms of their strengths.

In looking at her own growth over her years of researching and writing “Mind in the Making,” Galinsky says delving into the research itself was full of surprises and questions leading to more questions. She was especially captivated by the fact that babies’ brains appear to be wired to help them to learn about the world in specific ways, and that this learning begins long before babies can be taught this kind of knowledge.

In “Mind in the Making,” Galinsky wrote, “babies’ capacities are truly amazing, but even more amazing is that we now know how to take advantage of these capacities to help babies and their older siblings develop the essential life skills to serve them throughout their lives.” And that’s what Galinsky and the Mind in the Making team are so proudly doing, day in and day out at the Bezos Family Foundation.

Even as Mind in the Making celebrates its 10th anniversary and continues to expand society’s knowledge base about young children’s behavior and development, more questions have introduced themselves to Galinsky’s inquiring mind.

“I’m continuing to pursue questions related to ‘Mind in the Making,’” she says. “But my big adventure now has been looking at adolescent development, including conducting several studies of adolescents and their parents. In addition, through the Bezos Family Foundation, I’ve gone out with filmmakers Lisa Rinehart and Jennifer Hamblett and filmed more than 35 leading researchers on adolescents’ development around the world.”

Galinsky is currently writing a book about adolescence and hopes to create all kinds of resources, including materials to help adolescents understand their own development. She says, “I feel that I am unlocking new knowledge of how to help adolescents and the adults in their lives thrive.“

A worthy pursuit for Ellen Galinsky, adventure researcher—and the adolescents, parents, educators and others whose lives will be altered by this handiwork.

MITM: Creating Cultural Ripples of Early Learning + Brain Building

Researcher and author Ellen Galinsky likens the aftereffects of publishing a book to the ripples created by tossing a rock in a still lake. The size of the rock determines how far the ripples will reach. In the case of her “Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs,” it was mighty big rock.

Since Mind in the Making launched in 2010, more than 100,000 people in communities across the U.S. have participated in its training and learning modules. A survey of 1,750 respondents who attended the trainings revealed that 98 percent reported that the experience helped them improve their skills with children and learn new approaches and knowledge.
The MITM team has reviewed more than 2,000 studies and interviewed and filmed more than 160 leading researchers, incorporating their work in MITM training and tools
MITM has offered more than 300 presentations to national, state and community groups interested in education, workforce development, parenting and brain science; a half-million+ readers have downloaded MITM’s more than 100 free resources that help bridge the gap between knowledge and practice.
Vroom is a global program of the Bezos Family Foundation that offers free, science-based tips and tools to help caregivers and parents give children a great start in life. Communities, organizations, brands and media have worked together to reach parents where they are: community-based health clinics, refugee camps, children’s museums and other essential settings. These free tools that the Mind in the Making team helped create are offered in English and Spanish, and show how little changes can make a big impact on growing brains.
To see how MITM has been at the center of magical mind-building events and programs, see Early Learning Nation’s extensive examples.

What The Experts Say About Mind in the Making

Reprinted from Early Learning Nation

August 23, 2025August 24, 2025

Child Care vs. School/Education vs. Care

By Ellen Galinsky

Community Engagement, From the Field

The divide between how school is currently seen (as education) and child care is seen (as caring at best and as warehousing at worst) is not only infuriating, it is just plain wrong. What’s worse, it could take us back 40 years.

This backwards turn ignores the decades of research revealing that the early years are foundational to learning. It also ignores the decades of research revealing that children need both education and care when they are infants, toddlers and preschoolers, and when they are school-aged and older.

This is not a semantic argument. It is creating draconian decisions policy makers, educators, and families have to make. For families, it’s trying to stay safe, having your children learn and earn a living when in-person child care may be open but in-person school is not and you have different children in different places on different days of the week and your job is lost or in jeopardy. For teachers, it is trying to stay safe, trying to teach when children may not have connectivity or learn well online and your own child’s care is a house of cards. For programs and policy makers, it is trying to stay open or being forced to close because there isn’t enough money. And for everyone, it is ongoing uncertainty and fear.

Thank you, Elliot Haspel—author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It—for your eloquence and perfect timing for this OpEd. He highlights “the duality of the conversations around child cares programs and public schools and the perceived gap between what “care” and “education” mean. That gap has set the two sectors on different paths of funding, governance and professional power.” in “Why Are Child Cares Open When Schools Are Not?” and the even more explicit lead-in “Society’s perception of child care being of lesser quality to education has rarely been so pronounced” for The New York Times.

If ever there was a time to try to heal schisms, this is it!

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Mind in the Making and Amazing Babies

By Ellen Galinsky

From the Field, Latest Research

An Exercise: What Is Life Like Today? Think about some words that describe what life is like today. What words come to mind?

Did your words reflect the challenges of living in a complicated, distracting world? Did you think of words that describe feelings of being rushed, time starved, of having too much to do and not enough time to do it? Did you focus on the uncertainties, the changes that ricochet in our economic systems, or the volatility of relationships in a diverse and unpredictable world? Did you focus on the moments that give you pleasure, large and small?

Life today can be all of these things—complex, distracting, fast moving, 24-7, and stressful. It is also joyful and full of exciting possibilities.

We know that if it is this way for us, it is only going to be more so for our children. We all want the best for our children, but how do we help them not only survive but thrive, today and in the future?

It is clear that there is information children need to learn—facts, figures, concepts, insights, and understandings. But we have neglected something that is equally essential—children need life skills.

What do I mean by skills? Take the words often used to describe the world: complicated, distracting. Or the words about time: 24-7, rushed, time starved, too much to do and not enough time to do it. To navigate this world, children need to focus, to determine what is important and to pay attention to this, amid many distractions. Focus is one of the essential skills we need to promote in our children.

Or take the words used to describe the complexity of life in an uncertain, even volatile world. Another essential skill is the ability to understand others’ perspectives—perspective taking—despite whether we end up agreeing or disagreeing with them.

There are three essential points about these life skills:

These skills are not only important for children; we as adults need them just as much as children do. And, in fact, we have to practice them ourselves to promote them in our children. That’s why I call them life skills.
We don’t need expensive programs, materials, or equipment to promote these skills. We can promote them in everyday ways through the everyday fun things we do with children.
It is never too late to help children learn these life skills, no matter what their ages.

So many books for parents make us feel guilty or that we have made mistakes. Mind in the Making is not a guilt trip but a way that helps us understand children’s development in new ways, with hundreds of to-do suggestions. These are the conclusions I have drawn from my own research, from spending more than eight years interviewing more than seventy researchers on children, and from reading more than a thousand studies to write Mind in the Making.

Amazing Babies

One theme from the research on children and learning is that babies’ brains appear to be wired to help them understand and know about the world in specific ways, and that this learning begins long before babies can be taught this kind of knowledge. Babies four months short of their first birthdays already have what I call a language sense: they can detect statistical patterns in which sounds go together in their native language (or languages) to determine the beginnings and endings of words in a “sea of sounds,” as the studies of Jenny Saffran of the University of Wisconsin show.

Since babies that young can’t talk, how can researchers possibly know this? Babies—like all of us—are drawn to anything new. So the researcher gives babies something to listen to or look at that is new to them and they look or listen until they get bored. At that point, the researcher presents them with other things to listen to or look at and can tell from the babies’ reactions which things the babies view as new (measured by longer listening or looking times) and which they see as familiar (measured by shorter listening or looking times).

So when Jenny Saffran and her colleagues presented babies with a made-up language and, in subsequent studies, with a language they didn’t know, they found that babies seem to use an almost statistical-like process to learn that certain sounds are likely to follow other sounds in that language.

As a result, the babies became bored with and stopped listening to the made-up or the unfamiliar language after a while, but showed renewed interest when they were presented with new combinations of sounds.

Similar studies have shown that infants six months old and even younger have a number sense: they can detect the difference between large and small numbers of things—such as the difference between eight and sixteen dots, or the difference between a large and a small number of times that a puppet jumps or a car honks its horn, as seen in the studies of Elizabeth Spelke and her colleagues of Harvard University.

And they have what I call a people sense: they focus on people’s intentions rather than seeing what people do as random movements in space, as shown by the studies of Amanda Woodward of the University of Maryland. By six months, they can tell the difference between who’s helpful and who’s not, which Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom of Yale demonstrate by showing the children a puppetlike show where a round circle with big eyes tries to reach the top of a hill and is helped up to the top by a square but pushed down the hill by a triangle.

After the children view the show, an experimenter who doesn’t know what has happened in the experiment (so as not to influence the babies) enters and places the triangle and the square on a tray in front of the baby to see which one he or she reaches for. Will the six-month-old reach for the character that helped the circle achieve its goal (the helper) or the character that prevented the circle from achieving its goal (the hinderer), or is there no pattern to the babies’ choices? Of course, the researchers sometimes used the triangle as the helper and the square as the hinderer.

Hamlin says:

We found impressively that almost one hundred percent of the babies in a number of different studies preferred the more positive character.

Yes, babies’ capacities are truly amazing, but even more amazing is that we now know how to take advantage of these capacities to help babies and their older sisters and brothers develop the essential life skills that will serve them throughout their lives.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Helping Children to Learn to Take on Challenges: Lessons from Heidelise Als

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field

I’m writing about is Heidelise Als of Harvard University, because her studies are so instructive in how we can help children deal with challenges and learn to become stronger as a result.

Perhaps surprisingly, learning this skill doesn’t just happen when children are older. Als’ research is with pre-term babies born 10 to 12 weeks before their due date—the most fragile babies in neonatal intensive care units. When adults watch what young children do to cope successfully and then create situations where they can do more of the same, the process for learning to take on challenges is seeded.

The insight that led to Als’ research began in her native Germany when she was as a teacher of 3rd grade boys. One of the boys, Reinhart, always came to school early, sat in his seat close to the front of the classroom, lined up all of his pencils and books on the desk and was ready for the day to begin. Since Reinhart was doing very well and got good grades, Als decided to move him farther back in the room so another child who needed extra help could have a seat in the front.

She says:

Reinhart moved promptly, yet the next day he didn’t come in. He had never missed a day of school. I was very concerned. He didn’t come the next day.

After a few days, Als stopped by the bakery Reinhart’s family ran. His mother told her that the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, but her son had been vomiting. The clue came when Reinhart’s mother mentioned, “He did tell me you moved his seat, and he’s now sitting farther back.” Als says:

I learned from that that despite seeing the image of a very competent child, I should have known from his need to have everything lined up at the start of the school day—that he didn’t have the flexibility that other children had.

Reinhart was given his old seat back when he returned to school, but Als gained even more from that experience. She learned how important it is to “read” the language of children’s behavior, to figure out how they cope best and then build on their own positive coping strategies. This lesson was reinforced after she moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school and had her own child, who is significantly brain damaged. She had to learn to understand the language of his behavior in order to help him.

Als brought that sensitivity into her research on premature babies. Through advances in technology in the 1970s, these babies, who couldn’t yet breathe on their own, could be kept alive with medical ventilators that, in effect, breathed for them. What really interested Als was “to see what these babies were up against” and how they were handling these stressful situations.

As she observed them, it became clear to her that good medical care was coming at the price of good developmental care:

The premature babies would be pinned down, held down, strapped down, and even chemically treated, if needed, so that they would not breathe against the ventilator in order to let the ventilator do the work that it needed to do.

A similar kind of scene took place when a nurse or doctor wanted to check on a baby, listen to the baby’s heart rate or change him or her: The baby would just splay out—all four limbs would fly out, and then the baby would try to grasp at something, but the nurse by then would already be putting her stethoscope on the chest, listening to the chest sounds. And then she would turn the baby over again and listen to the back, and then she would start to suction his lungs and then she would give a nebulizer treatment.

As the check-up progressed, Als reports, babies would become more and more distraught; finally, they would “go limp and typically stop breathing.” It was clear to Heidelise Als that the medical care was so focused on caring for these premature babies’ hearts or lungs that they were neglecting the care of the whole child:

It seemed we were wasting a lot of the baby’s energies that were very precious. We were going against the baby. We were pushing the baby to become exhausted and give in.

When a baby who was initially feisty gave in, the medical charts would record that the baby had become well adjusted. But Als saw a different reality:

The baby had given up. The baby just let the world happen.

Als and her colleagues—nurses and doctors—set out to improve developmental care and to document that it can make a difference. They thought of this as listening to their behavioral “language.” She says:

If we can understand the ‘words’ the baby is saying, maybe we can fill in the meaning of the sentence and understand the message.

These observations led to solutions. For example, if the baby’s hands splay out, give the baby something to hold onto. If the baby is squirming under the bright lights, make the lighting softer. If the baby is getting agitated, hold the baby until his or her breathing becomes more stable. After documenting and recording behavior, they launched into a study where the nurses “read” and then responded to the baby’s behavior in ways that built on that baby’s coping strategies, and thus gave the baby more control.

The results of this experiment were impressive. There was reduced severity of chronic lung disease in these premature babies, improved brain functioning, improved growth and earlier release from the hospital. In addition, their care was significantly less costly.

Here’s the lesson I take from this. Children, even those as young as premature infants, are less prone to the harmful effects of stress when they are supported in managing their own stress by being helped to use the strategies they have for coping and for calming down.

And when children are older, they can become an even more active part of figuring out themselves how to deal with tough times. Als tells the story of a child for whom any reminders of 9/11 (like fire trucks) would trigger emotionally flooding. With the help of adults, he created his own strategy to calm down. He would put his head down on the table to “think” and would wait until he had “thought enough”—and then he was ready to go on.

From these studies, it is clear that we can help children learn to handle tough times if we enable them to become increasingly active partners in creating their own solutions. It has worked for me and it has worked for my children. What about you?

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Focus and Self Control . . . Maybe as Important as IQ

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field

Focus and Self Control . . . Maybe as Important as IQ

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University and a group of other academics reviewed six studies that followed children over time, offering a rare opportunity to evaluate what kinds of skills or knowledge acquired early in life matter most to children’s later success. They compared children’s school achievement in math and reading between the ages of eight and thirteen to assessments of these same children when they were between ages four and six.

What did they conclude? Out of literally hundreds of analyses, only three skills that children had when they entered school were strongly related to their later success in reading and math. Two are obvious: the children who had good math and reading skills when they entered school had good math and reading skills years later.

But the third skill is less obvious. It was attention skills—the more penetrating our attention, the richer and deeper our learning. As Brooks-Gunn says:

Attention skills allow children to focus on something in a way that maximizes the information they get out of it.

Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia has been a pioneer in studying what scientists call the executive functions of the brain—because these are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. She believes that executive functions predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests:

Executive functions are different than what people usually think of when they think of IQ. Typical traditional IQ tests measure what’s called crystallized intelligence, which is mostly your recall of what you’ve already learned—like what’s the meaning of this word, or what’s the capital of that country? What executive functions tap is your ability to use what you already know—to be creative with it, to problem-solve with it—so it’s very related to fluid intelligence, because that requires reasoning and using information. There’s a big overlap between fluid intelligence and executive functions.

Executive functions, which emerge during the preschool years and don’t fully mature until early adulthood, appear to have a bearing on school success, too:

If you look at what predicts how well children will do later in school, more and more evidence is showing that executive functions—working memory and inhibition—actually predict success better than IQ tests.

Philip David Zelazo of the University of Minnesota, also a leading researcher studying executive functions of the brain, sees more of an overlap between IQ and executive functions. For example, we might not do well on an IQ test because we’re distracted and can’t pay attention. Also, having a good working memory matters in both IQ and executive functions. Like Diamond, Zelazo notes that executive functions enable us to use our knowledge:

If you ask what is the difference between these two constructs, I think it would be that it is possible to have knowledge of what one’s supposed to do—but for various reasons to have difficulty acting in light of that knowledge.

Executive functions take place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. I love the term that Stanislas Dehaene uses to describe this part of the brain—a global neuronal workspace:

It’s a theoretical construct, but the human brain contains a set of areas that are much more tightly interconnected to each other—like hubs in airports.

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the ability to exchange information across the high-level areas of the brain, Dehaene says, so that our behavior can be guided by our accumulated knowledge.

That’s the beauty and the purpose of executive functions: they enable us to control ourselves, to reflect deeply, and to consider things from multiple points of view.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Mind in the Making: Transforming Communities with Science and Heart

By Erin Ramsey, Former Senior Manager, Mind in the Making at the Bezos Family Foundation

Community Engagement, From the Field

For seven years, I’ve shared the brain science of Mind in the Making (MITM) with people from all walks of life. Thus far, approximately 100,000 educators, community leaders, families and professionals from education, libraries, medical facilities, museums, nonprofits, law enforcement, mental health, churches, prisons and more have participated in the MITM Learning Modules.

These Learning Modules lead with science, combining deep research focused on executive function skills, with signature science-fueled learning. The training provides opportunities for adults to examine themselves, the research and the actions they can take to promote effective learning in themselves and in children. The training is based on the book, Mind in the Making: Seven Essential Life Skills that help adults understand and encourage the critical executive function-based skills children need to thrive.

No matter how many groups I work with—regardless of the varied reasons they begin the journey—it’s been so gratifying to see the connections forged among individuals and communities who attend the trainings.

Why is this so gratifying? Because it’s rare to create a platform and an experience where people with high levels of education and people with very little education learn from each other, where different cultures and ethnicities come together and feel empowered by each other, and where various professions and points of influence in children’s lives converge on commonalities rather than on our differences.

MITM provides a rare instance where individuals take the time to reflect about their own Life Skills and how they want to move forward while applying the science in their own lives.

Our process engages families, communities and sectors in new ways, in a true cross-sector collaboration. This is community building and as a bonus, we level the playing field and give states and communities ways to join forces and accomplish change together.

Also inspiring: the decisions people make, the goals they set and the perspectives they gain. Some of my favorites include when the connection between the science and Life Skills help people set goals that put the research into daily practice. Self-directed, real-life application becomes a game changer. For example, this happens when a co-worker decides to work on Focus and Self Control by practicing being a better listener instead of trying to fix something or interject ideas. Or when a parent or caretaker decides to ask more questions to improve Perspective Taking skills. Or when the teacher steps back and reflects upon the relationships with families in a new light that leads to improved Communicating skills.

Another favorite part of the learning journey for me is witnessing the paradigm shift among participants who learn that we can only set goals for ourselves, not for children or other adults. It is powerful when adults put the actions and desired outcomes on themselves. For instance, instead of a teacher asking young children to sit and listen to develop Focus and Self Control, the teacher sets a goal grounded in research: play more skill games and teach strategies to promote Focus and Self Control. Children benefit when we begin with adults.

I particularly love how the Life Skills empower people to look at themselves and at children with a genuine and effective strength-based lens. The Life Skills and strategies to promote the Life Skills provide space for participants to remember that if they are struggling, they are not innately flawed or “at fault” or “bad parents.” These skills can be developed with strategies and practice, and MITM provides the science, strategies and practice.

Keeping the love of learning alive for adults and children—the mission at the heart of Mind in the Making—is what keeps me passionate about this work. It boils down to our humanness while building on a solid foundation of effective teaching and learning, science, child development and goal setting. We connect the science and the communities so people can keep or reignite their love of learning to help children do the same.

Mind in the Making and all the people I have worked with have been gifts beyond description. Bringing the science and heart together is a winning combination that transforms lives.

Category: From the Field

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