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June 18, 2010
Kids get ABCs of love
Israeli prof’s mental health program is widely used.
KARIN KLOOSTERMAN ISRAEL21C
Today’s kids living in Africa with HIV receive antiretroviral drugs to stop the progression of HIV into full-blown AIDS and will likely survive into adulthood. But health-care workers know that it’s just as important to heal the mind as it is to heal the body.
To take on the challenge of nurturing and growing the minds and potential of African children with HIV-AIDS, the United States National Institute of Mental Health, through the University of Michigan, started a training program that gives health-care workers and educators the tools to assess and promote the education of children. Out of thousands of possible methods and models, the institute based its program on one developed by Prof. Pnina Klein of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
“The infants and children in Africa have been receiving medicine to keep them alive and it has been working quite well,” Klein said, but “it’s not enough to just deal with the physical problems, especially when we’re dealing with infants and toddlers. One’s mental health and physical health are interrelated.”
Klein’s approach, which is being used all over the world, is called Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC). It is now in its second year of a three-year pilot program in Africa.
“I couldn’t imagine that among all the thousands of programs available that promote development in children, they would choose mine, but they did,” said Klein, now in her 60s, who has worked in early childhood education for nearly 35 years.
At first glance, the range of MISC is surprising, as it targets children with developmental disabilities, those from low-income families, as well as those who are gifted. It is an intervention program that is individually tailored to each child, based on analyses of videotaped parent-child interactions. Research has demonstrated that enhancing the quality of parental mediation vastly improves a child’s cognitive performance and social and emotional behavior.
MISC assesses the “mental diet children receive,” Klein explained, adding, “We need a good mental diet as much as a physical one – one with proteins and minerals. Through MISC, we can quantify the quality and number of interactions with young children, including the education they get, and we can measure it and come up with a profile for each child and each interaction.
“We are focusing on the roots of the interaction – on feelings, which I call the ABC[s] of love: smiles, looks, eye-to-eye contact, mutual engagement and three basic messages: ‘I love you,’ which conveys the message of self-worth, ‘I am with you,’ which conveys security, and a message that ‘it is worthwhile to do,’” Klein said. These reinforcements allow a child to feel his or her significance in the world, and can help to regulate behavior.
In Israel, MISC is taught to staff at the Health Ministry’s infant care clinics. Requiring no special equipment and easily adapted to any culture, the program is popular around the world. In Sri Lanka, it was initiated by UNICEF (to which Klein is a consultant) and continues under the aegis of Save the Children. Universities sponsor the program in Norway, Indonesia and Ethiopia. In Sweden, it is used to train staff at day-care centres; in Florida, it’s part of a program for minority children. At the University of Southern California, the method is used to teach kids with attention deficit disorder. It is widely used by music teachers and has improved literacy by having an impact on the way that parents read to their children.
It may be because her parents expected a lot from her that Klein has become one of the world’s most influential early childhood educators.
“I received so much love and there were so many expectations. Part of my theory and programs are an outgrowth of realizing all the privileges I received,” she said. “My parents were not rich but they taught me what’s important, how to define and transfer it.”
Born in Poland, her family was decimated in the Holocaust, but both parents survivied. Klein was the first baby to be born in her family after the war and, soon, they moved to Tel Aviv. Klein holds a double BSc in psychology and biology and a PhD in education. Married to a geneticist and the mother of three children, Klein lives in Givat Shmuel, where she heads the early child development graduate program and is director of the Baker Centre for Research and Treatment of Children with Special Needs.
One of the first babies to make aliyah to the new state of Israel, Klein was honored by being invited to light a torch at the ceremony celebrating Israel’s 60th Independence Day, in recognition of her academic research. A light unto the nations in her own right, many of the world’s children will live richer lives thanks to Klein’s work.
ISRAEL21C is a nonprofit foundation with a mission to focus attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
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