It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton Page A

perform the essential tasks of early childhood will be impaired. The next time you hear someone using the word “investment” to describe what we need to do for our younger, more vulnerable family members, think about the investments the village has the power to make in children’s first few weeks, months, and years. They will reap us all extraordinary dividends as children travel through the crucial stages of cognitive and emotional development to come.

Kids Don’t Come with Instructions
    We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
    JEAN TOOMER
    T here I was, lying in my hospital bed, trying desperately to figure out how to breast-feed. I had been trained to study everything forward, backward, and upside down before reaching a conclusion. It seemed to me I ought to be able to figure this out. As I looked on in horror, Chelsea started to foam at the nose. I thought she was strangling or having convulsions. Frantically, I pushed every buzzer there was to push.
    A nurse appeared promptly. She assessed the situation calmly, then, suppressing a smile, said, “It would help if you held her head up a bit, like this.” Chelsea was taking in my milk, but because of the awkward way I held her, she was breathing it out of her nose!
    Like many women, I had read books when I was pregnant—wonderful books filled with dos and don’ts about what babies need in the first months and years to ensure the proper development of their bodies, brains, and characters. But as every parent soon discovers, grasping concepts in the abstract and knowing what to do with the baby in your hands are two radically different things. Babies don’t come with handy sets of instructions.
    How well I remember Chelsea crying her heart out one night soon after Bill and I brought her home from the hospital. Nothing we could do would quiet her wailing—and we tried everything. Finally, as I held her in my arms, I looked down into her little bunched-up face. “Chelsea,” I said, “this is new for both of us. I’ve never been a mother before, and you’ve never been a baby. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can.”
    In her classic book Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead observed that a Samoan mother was expected to give birth in her mother’s village, even if she had moved to her husband’s village upon marriage. The father’s mother or sister had to attend the birth as well, to care for the newborn while the mother was being cared for by her relatives. With their collective experience as parents, they helped ease the transition into parenthood by showing how it was done.
    In our own American experience, families used to live closer together, making it easier for relatives to pitch in during pregnancy and the first months of a newborn’s life. Women worked primarily in the home and were more available to lend a hand to new mothers and to help them get accustomed to motherhood. Families were larger, and older children were expected to aid in caring for younger siblings, a role that prepared them for their own future parenting roles.
    These days, there is no shortage of advice, equipment, and professional expertise available to those who can pay for it. If breast-feeding is a problem, for example, there are lactation specialists, state-of-the-art breast pumps, and more books on the subject than you can count. But nothing replaces simple hands-on instruction, as I can attest. People and programs to help fledgling parents are few and far between, even though such help costs surprisingly little. We are not giving enough attention to what ought to be our highest priority: educating and empowering people to be the best parents possible.
    Education and empowerment start with giving parents the means and the encouragement to plan pregnancy itself, so that they have the physical, financial, and emotional resources to support their children. Some of the best models for