Looking for more reasons that demonstrate why we need the Education Begins At Home Act, and programs that support new parents, like the paradigmatic program developed by David Olds?

ScienceDigest reports on a study showing how neglect can adversely affect the brain development of children.

"Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult," said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. "We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."
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The researchers suspect that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame, since in animals, stress and environmental deprivation have been shown to affect the prefrontal cortex.

That's not good, since it affects school performance. And it's not necessary: educating parents makes a difference.

It's important that parents have the opportunity to get basic information about their opportunity to provide interaction that will help stimulate development:

"In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids" can boost prefrontal cortex performance, Boyce said.

"We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids – there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens," he said. "But changing developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation and people saying things to each other."