Hi,

I’ve been thinking a lot about food these days. Food in liquid form, such as breast milk, the magic potion our bodies create to feed our children, but also food in a figurative sense; the hugs, love and overall nurture babies need at the beginning of life.

As your First 1,000 Days correspondent, I think about my own daily diet too. I wonder about the right balance between readings that enhance my understanding of this crucial period of life and those that just throw me into despair.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been overdoing the latter. Too much hopeless information, too quickly, without the chance to digest it properly.

This is why I’m taking advantage of this newsletter to pause and look back at some of the articles that my fellow writers at The Correspondent have produced that have made me think about the beginning of life from a different, more foundational perspective.

This comes with a bonus: the beautiful images that accompany these pieces are a fruit of the creative labour of many makers and our in-house image editors. Kudos to Lise Straatsma and Yara van der Velden for their hard work!

Maternity wards are a great place to learn what quality healthcare can (and should) look like

A dummy plastic newborn baby is seen photographed outside a dummy mother’s bleeding vulva.
From the series Life and Death by photographer Daniel Stier

Dr Njoki Ngumi was, until recently, a medical officer in a busy obstetric and referral hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. she starts from a maternity ward to talk about the things that are wrong with hospital care, and what can be done to fix the system. The bottom line? We need to stop dehumanising patients and put care at the centre of healthcare. This is especially important when what’s at stake are the very first experiences in a person’s life.

Touch is the first sense we develop and is vital to who we become

A child’s hand seen on a mother’s naked chest.
‘Eden and me, 2006’ from the series Mother (Prestel, 2013) by Elinor Carucci

Skin-to-skin contact is fundamental in our development as human beings. At a time when we’re being told that we shouldn’t touch others because it can put us at risk of contagion, Sanity correspondent Tanmoy Goswami wrote about the importance of our sense of touch – the first one we develop as a foetus, and the only one we can’t really ever turn off. Just think of this: premature, low-birth-weight newborns who receive regular body massage gain more weight than their unstimulated peers and tend to be discharged from the hospital sooner.

Grandparents are essential to raising children

An elderly woman and an elderly man are photographed picking flowers in a garden.
From the series Aina & Tage by Rebecka Uhlin

They are depicted as the most vulnerable in society. During the coronavirus they were asked to lock themselves away. But the elderly, our grandparents, play an essential role in society. In Lynn Berger shows how important the elderly – and grandparents especially – are for raising children and for making our species successful.

Homeschooling is tough on parents. But it can liberate our kids (and they’ll learn more too)

An illustrated gif with two side profiles of orange coloured children sitting in a row individually at yellow school desks, hands holding pencils and writing, against a green brick wall and large window. Here, we see flashing confetti-style small boxes and squiggles popping up against images of blue and pink fish, orange and purple birds, a ladybird under a magnifying glass and blue, pink and orange open or closed books.
Illustration by Michelle Pereira, for The Correspondent

In my research and writing I’ve come across a lot of information about how formal education systems are not the best at recognising how children learn and how to help them in that process. Zoe Smith looks at how remote, independent learning can help children – and asks whether it is possible for self-directed learning to be accessible for parents who have neither the time nor the money.

Before you go …

One more tip for you: I’ve started listening to a single mother and parenting coach in the United States. One of her aims is to talk about “how to raise liberated black kids without breaking their spirits”.

In the first episode, she refers to Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America, a book by Dr Stacey Patton that traces spanking back to the violence that slaves were subjected to in the plantations. Williams reflects about her own learning curve, trying to figure out how to deconstruct her own beliefs and the cultural norms around her (such as spanking) in order to raise a hopeful, liberated black daughter.

What have you been reading and listening to that you’d like to share? Please leave your tips below this piece on the site, or email me.

By the time you receive this, I’ll be on holiday, so I’ll see you in two weeks!

Until then,

Irene

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