Kenneth L. Davis, MD, left, with Jackie and Mike Bezos of the Bezos Family Foundation.
A partnership between Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital and the Bezos Family Foundation aims to transform pediatric health care through an innovative program that provides science-based tips, tools, and activities to enhance a child’s early brain development during the critical years from birth to age five. The effort, a collaboration with the Mount Sinai Parenting Center, is based on a core premise—that everyday interactions between a child and a parent, caregiver, or health care providers can be turned into an opportunity to build cognition and language skills, and help form strong interpersonal relationships. It is the cornerstone of an early learning program, known as Vroom, that was developed by the Bezos Family Foundation.
“In a child’s early years, the brain makes more than 1 million neural connections on average each second, which means every moment you spend with a child is an opportunity for brain-building activities,” says Carrie Quinn, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Parenting Center. “The health care environment offers a unique opportunity to reach parents during these formative years.”
The Parenting Center has saturated hallways, elevators, and exam rooms—in the prenatal, labor and delivery, postpartum, and neonatal intensive care units; and in the pediatric emergency department and the pediatric clinic—with easy-to-read signs that serve as canvases to convey more than 500 messages about parenting. “This prompts everyone to think about how they can make each interaction more meaningful, whether you are a parent in a waiting room, a pediatrician doing a consultation, or a security guard who is the first to greet families and typically the last person to say goodbye,” says Aliza Pressman, PhD, the Parenting Center’s Co-Founding Director and Director of Clinical Programming, and Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“From using a sing-song voice called ‘Parentese’ while changing a diaper, to modeling backand- forth conversations with toddlers, each moment becomes an opportunity to promote healthy brain development,” adds Blair Hammond, MD, Co-Founding Director and Director of Medical Education for the Parenting Center, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“The science we have funded for more than a decade clearly shows that children’s early development is dependent on parents and other caring adults in their lives,” says Mike Bezos, Vice President and Co-Founder of the Bezos Family Foundation. “Health care professionals like those at the Mount Sinai Parenting Center are natural partners.”
Adds Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, “Mount Sinai has long recognized that the health of any child goes well beyond the immediate concerns that families present with and that we must always be holistic in our approach to facilitate their development and put them on a path of lifelong well-being.”
The initiative also offers a training component that includes video, e-learning, and in-person classroom support for all staff in the designated units to ensure they are well-equipped to apply the fundamentals of brain development science in their interactions with children and parents. More than 1,000 faculty and staff will be trained in clinical disciplines, such as Nursing and Social Work, an effort that also includes staff in nonclinical areas, such as Housekeeping, Patient Transport, and Security. The potential to influence thousands of children and their families is great. Each year, there are more than 50,000 primary care and emergency room visits, and more than 8,000 babies born at Kravis Children’s Hospital.
This initiative is the latest innovative effort by the Parenting Center. In 2018, it launched a pilot program with eight hospitals, including The Mount Sinai Hospital, to offer a free online curriculum for residents that integrates the science of early childhood development with pediatric training, teaching residents how to better inform, encourage, and interact with parents during well-child visits. Developed in partnership with Mind in the Making, a program of the Bezos Family Foundation, 76 hospitals around the nation have offered the curriculum to date, and an estimated 1,900 residents have enrolled.