Photo by Tim Wade

“Each of us must come to care about everyone else’s children…

After all, when one of our children needs lifesaving surgery, someone else’s child will perform it.

If one of our children is threatened or harmed by violence, someone else’s child will be responsible for the violent act.

The good life for our own children can be secured only if the good life is secured for all other people’s children.”

Lilian Katz, Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana

When asked about the challenges of raising young children, parents most often cite isolation as one of the biggest problems they face on a day-to-day basis, followed by child development information, and how to help their children develop social and emotional skills. Luckily, Parenting Communities, our Leelanau County home-grown early childhood-focused program, has been supporting parents here for over twenty years. Parenting Communities is the resource all parents can go to for help meeting the many and varied challenges of raising young children.

Secrets to Parenting Successful Children

Mother, educator and author of How to Raise Successful People, Esther Wojcicki raised three daughters who each are successful professionals — a professor, a doctor, and an entrepreneur. She has identified five fundamental values that help children become capable, successful people; to make it easy to remember, she calls these values “TRICK.”

Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns

A surgeon at the Comer Children’s Hospital pioneered a cochlear implant program that allowed deaf children to hear for the first time. Yet some children with an implant never learned to speak, even though they could hear. The surgeon was driven to figure out why.