Intelligence is mainly nurtured, that is, created through interactions and experience rather than inherited. Children's school achievement is strongly affected by their early experience, especially the human interactions that produce brain capacity. Therefore, parents, teachers, and all the other relationships and places that children experience in their early years directly affect brain development - either shaping and building its capacity or limiting its growth. This makes pre-school education particularly important. Decades of research show that high quality pre-school programs have strong positive effects on later life and school achievement.
Research also shows that children in poor programs fare poorly on school achievement measures.
With such hard evidence of the critical importance of early childhood experiences, it should be obvious that early childhood is not a waiting room before the real work of intellectual and emotional development takes place. Rather, it is an important and fairly narrow window in time when the foundations for children's adult personalities and capabilities are laid down. What is at stake in the discussion of quality child care, therefore, is nothing short of our children's futures and the future of our citizenry. With most young children in programs outside their homes before they enter kindergarten, the future of our nation depends on how we educate young children today.