>> SHONKOFF: We know that the environment of relationships that children are developing in have a tremendous impact on their development and health.
And we know that includes a big role for parents. It's literally part of our biology that we require
what we call "serve and return" interaction between adults and young children, where children do something and adults respond.
It's this back-and-forth serve and return interaction that literally shapes the architecture of the brain.
>> FISHER: For many years, early childhood programs focused on what the children need--building their literacy, building their ability to get along with peers, and so forth.
More recently, the emphasis has shifted to building the caregiver's capacity with the idea that if you can address these underlying issues with the caregivers, it's going to have a cascading effect
to the children and impact their development in similar areas as well.
>> GORTNEY: Many of our families are in kind of a crisis mode where they're responding to the crisis of the week, or the crisis of the day.
>> SHONKOFF: And the issue is how do we help, not how do we tell people what to do. How can we provide supports to help families, above and beyond giving parents information
to strengthen their ability to promote healthy development?
>> FISHER: Really what's happening with what Children's Home Society is doing now is to work collaboratively with researchers, myself included, to co-create a program
in the natural context of their agency and with the families that they're serving. So this is sort of like, you know, an evolutionary step forward.
>> GORTNEY: There are other video coaching programs, but what we really liked about FIND that seemed innovative and really set it apart was that in FIND, we just take video of parents and then we only look for
the places where parents are doing the interaction that we're hoping to encourage, or hoping to help them learn about.
>> GREENLEY: FIND stands for filming interaction to nurture development, and we just go in with a little Flip camera
and we watch; we say, "Do what you do. Wash dishes. Play a game. Have a snack." And film the family for about ten minutes.
And then we take that film back and edit it, and we're picking out these moments of parent-child interaction, the serve-and-return interaction, which is the child giving you some kind of cue and responding to it.
>> GORTNEY: When parents see the video with their coach and talk about the video, they're only seeing that tiny little moment where the child makes a serve, and the parent responds to it and returns the serve in a positive way.
The coach will talk with the parent about how, "It's this type of interaction that's really strengthening your child's brain development."
There are different ways that parents can respond: supporting and encouraging what they're doing, naming what they're doing, which is helping to build kind of the basic architecture for language and vocabulary.
The coach will view those with the parent, and they'll literally go just a few frames, and they'll stop, and describe, "Okay, your child just looked at the toy."
And then you do a few more frames, and then you stop and you say, "And you turn your head and notice that your child is looking at the toy."
And then you do a few more frames, "And then you reach for the toy and bring it to the child," and then you say, 'Are you looking at this?' Or, 'Do you want to play with this?'
And look; your child lights up and smiles when you say that."
That's what FIND is. It's just finding those tiny little moments and bringing attention to them. So, it's completely a strength-based program, and that fits so well with our philosophy as an agency and as a program.
So Children's Home Society is a great example of where that initial effort is being implemented in the context of early childhood programs very effectively;
but, you know, the programs already existed. And so what this is potentially doing is improving the quality of those programs, providing additional resources to the parents,
but also giving the care providers, the therapists and home visitors, some very effective strategies when they work with the families.
I think working in this way where practitioners can connect directly with researchers just has a lot of potential to help
children and families. Because we know the practice side. We know our families. Having access to researchers with great ideas about ways to tweak
the programs, or new interventions that might plug in to existing programs; I mean, there's no way that social services people working in programs in Seattle are going to have access
to neuroscientists and top researchers without something like this project. I think now I feel like there are real possibilities to change things.