I attended a breakout session on Early Childhood at the recent Oregon Business Plan Leadership Summit. Having been involved in launching the Oregon Business Plan and Leadership Summit at the end of my second term as Governor in 2002, I’d like to make a few observations that are relevant to the summit in general, and to the relationship between early childhood investment and the Business Plan.
I appreciate that the 2024 Leadership Summit decided to include a breakout session on early childhood. I want to suggest, however, that if we are serious about the future health of our business sector, this should be a main stage topic, not a breakout. The downstream impact of early childhood trauma and adverse experience is draining the vitality from our business community, undermining the effectiveness of investments to rebuild our workforce, and saddling us with billions of dollars of avoidable cost.
This breakout session is called Early Childhood and Child Care. Child Care is certainly a crisis, costing the Oregon economy an estimated $2.15 billion a year in decreased productivity, lost earnings, and increased public assistance. Why then, are the state and the business community not investing heavily in Child Care?
But Child Care is just the tip of the iceberg. We have an understandable tendency to respond to very visible, acute problems—like street addiction and unsheltered homelessness—while ignoring the root causes that lead to these problems in the first place.
We know, for example, that childhood trauma is one of the leading causes of developing addiction later in life. We also know that people who experience trauma as children, such as abuse, neglect or household dysfunction, are more likely to become homeless as adults. What does that mean to the business sector? It means that many of the people who are overdosing on fentanyl in downtown Portland, or camping on the sidewalk in front of your businesses, suffered childhood trauma—trauma that we know how to prevent.
We know that poor nutrition and maternal stress—both before conception and during pregnancy—can alter genetic expression in the unborn child, dramatically increasing the risk of poor cognitive functions, learning disabilities, mental health and substance use disorders and early adult onset of many chronic illnesses.
We also know that the factors driving maternal and family stress are closely associated with the inability of a family to meet their basic needs, like food and housing and health care — and yes, child care. When family income is persistently inadequate to pay the cost of basic needs that family—and the children in that family—live with the stress of chronic economic insecurity.
Think about it. Pregnant women, and very young children and their families who struggle every day with the uncertainty of knowing whether they will be able to meet the most basic of needs—live in a crucible of toxic stress the undermines everything science tells us about what is necessary for healthy brain development in children.
And we vastly underestimate both the magnitude of this problem and the consequences of our failure to address it. Every year in our state over 17,000 children are born to mothers on Medicaid—which by definition and eligibility, means that these women and their newborn infants are living with the kind of economic stress that can seriously undermine the success of their children. If there were an infectious agent that we knew was going to compromise the future of 17,000 children every year … we would not stand for it. We would view it as an epidemic. We would muster our resources and meet the challenge aggressively.
Well, this is an epidemic and its course is just as deadly sure – not from an infectious agent, but from preventable childhood trauma. We don’t need to discover a vaccine to cure this epidemic, we simply need to make the well-recognized and evidence-based investments in very young children and their families that are the foundation of lifelong success … and of a successful economy.
We have the resources to do this. Last month’s revenue forecast projected that, in absolute terms, Oregon will have nearly $6 billion more to spend in the upcoming biennium than in the last one. So, not only do we need to make Early Childhood a main stage issue at the next Leadership Summit, we need to exercise our collective leadership now, by insisting that 2025 legislature use these new resources to prioritize an historic investment in very young children and their families.
This is not a challenge of inadequate resources — it is a challenge of political will, a challenge of the depth of our compassion for one another, and of our commitment to truly put our children first.
A strong economy is built on a foundation of strong families and thriving, successful children. We have an opportunity in 2025 to start building that foundation. Let’s not miss it.
