SYB 115 | Adult-ing is Hard • Parent 2 Parent Group

One of the major shifts in the massive education industry was the relatively recent awakening of the value of early childhood education. New research has shown that by the time a child is just 5 years old, the brain has undergone 85% of its development. The brain is on overdrive during the years BEFORE children start school.

Grade school and high school teachers are united in their belief that they can see the negative effects of students' early years when their childhood did not include books, music, numbers and games. Parents are their child's learning models - the first teacher the child knows - together they explore nature, read together, cook together and count together.

Parenting is a tough job and no one is born with the talent of being a perfect parent. Parenting has a million tedious aspects to it that are seemingly never-ending. You start off the job with sleep deprivation, you then graduate to dealing with your child's bodily function training and what can be done in public and what cannot. Then you field 724,000 mostly unanswerable questions - like why is the sky blue - and you are just on year 4.

Joseph Rice tripped into discovering a need for parents to get together to share their questions, concerns, fears and successes. It is part networking and part intervention. What started out as an informal networking group has grown into a new nonprofit organization that is dedicated to helping parents learn how to prepare their children to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.