Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [31]
Another skills-giving program I learned about more than twenty years ago helps children well before they start school, when their brains, emotions, and outlooks are rapidly developing. Especially in those preschool years, parents are their children’s most important teachers. Almost all of them want to do a good job, but for a variety of reasons many lack the skills to do so. That’s where HIPPY comes in.
Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters was developed in Israel in 1969 by Dr. Avima Lombard to help new immigrants prepare their young children to succeed in school. HIPPY empowers parents as their children’s first teachers by giving them the tools, skills, and confidence to work with their children at home. A typical HIPPY site reaches up to 180 children and their parents with one coordinator and twelve to eighteen part-time home visitors. The program is open to any parent, but is designed to help those families coping with poverty, lack of education, and social isolation.
In 1986, Hillary persuaded Dr. Lombard to help her establish a HIPPY program in Arkansas. She described the HIPPY formula for success in her book It Takes a Village:
A staff member recruited from the community comes into the home once a week and role-plays with the parent (usually the mother), demonstrating for her how she can work with her child to stimulate cognitive development. Along with special activity packets, the program employs common household objects to illustrate concepts. For example, a spoon and a fork might be used to demonstrate differences in shape or sharpness, or the volume control on the TV might be tuned up and down to teach concepts of loud and soft. The material in the activity packets, designed for parents who may not read well themselves, is outlined in straightforward fifteen-minute daily lesson plans arranged in a developmental sequence. The usual starting age is four, and most children participate for two years. Some programs add a third year, so children can begin the program at the age of three.
When we brought HIPPY into rural areas and housing projects in Arkansas, a number of educators and others did not believe that parents who had not finished high school were up to the task of teaching their children. Many of the parents doubted their own abilities. One mother whose home I visited told me she had always known she was supposed to put food on the table and a roof over her children’s heads, but no one had ever told her before that she was supposed to be her son’s first teacher.
Not only did the program help kids get jump-started in the right direction; it also gave the parents a boost in self-confidence. Many of them became interested in learning for themselves as well as for their children, going back to school to get a high school equivalency degree or even starting college. This is a particularly important development, because researchers cite a mother’s level of education as one of the key factors in determining whether her children do well in school. It stands to reason that when a mother furthers her own learning, she becomes more engaged in her child’s.
In 1988, HIPPY USA was established as an independent NGO headquartered in New York City. There are now about 146 HIPPY programs in twenty-five states and the District of Columbia, serving