Breathe
By Aranzazu Alonso, executive director and general coordinator of the Pact for Early Childhood.
Since the Pact for Early Childhood, I have spent the last few hours searching for the childhood policy of the two women running for the Presidency of the Republic. The result of my search is frustrating, to say the least, although anguish best describes the feeling that floods my heart.
I began my research by listening to the personal stories of Claudia and Xóchitl. In both stories I found reasons for hope: working women, engineers, professionals and mothers who faced challenges that many of us share.
Claudia talks about her love for children, and how she might have been a kindergarten teacher if she had not chosen to pursue a career in science. She shares with us her concern for getting her children to school on time, and how after lunch she took them to her mother's house to continue working and have the resources the family needed. We see the effort she made in Mexico City to strengthen early childhood care and development centers, and how she supported preschool students with her welfare scholarships.
Xóchitl recalls her childhood and remembers the fear of living in the home of a violent father, she talks about her dreams and the enormous effort to achieve them. She tells how after founding a company she could afford to take maternity leave to breastfeed her baby, whom she nursed for 6 months, and how her husband took care of her young children so that she could join the cabinet of then President Vicente Fox. She tells us how she started Fundación Porvenir because of her concern to see indigenous children suffering from malnutrition. We see her work as a legislator and there are initiatives to make breastfeeding a right, or to extend parental leave.
So much for the hope that burns in our hearts. These two powerful, real women, with possibilities of occupying the most responsible position in the country, understand and have lived our struggles, have faced first-hand the difficulty of working and raising children, have experienced discrimination or violence, and seem to have children in mind.
However, the public documents outlining their policy proposals should they become President only minimally reflect these experiences, convictions and personal values. Both claim that they will promote a Care System. This is a gain and an extraordinary advance from any point of view, but by no means can it exhaust what we expect from a woman president regarding children, particularly early childhood.
Almost 20 years ago, Chile had its first woman president, Michelle Bachellete, who together with her cabinet developed an emblematic policy that has served as an example for all of Latin America, and even the world: Chile Crece Contigo, a child protection system that put the youngest children of the Andean country, the children in early childhood, at the top of its priorities.
This visionary president understood that the key to combating poverty and inequality in Chile was to ensure the comprehensive development of girls and boys from the time they were in their mother's womb and during their first years of life. In other words, she could not and should not wait for children to enter primary school; that would be too late.
The most critical period in a person's life occurs between gestation and the first 5 years of life. It is here that the brain architecture and metabolic systems that are responsible for practically everything in our lives develop: our capacity to learn, to solve problems, to plan, to wait, to regulate ourselves, to empathize and to love; our propensity to chronic non-communicable diseases, to anti-social behaviors or to violence; all this is shaped in the first years of life, and depends in an important way on the conditions of adversity or protection that the state, the community and the family provide to these little people.
This is why dozens of countries in Latin America and around the world have published comprehensive early childhood care policies as central elements of their education, health and social protection systems. In Mexico, we achieved unprecedented progress with the publication of the National Strategy for Early Childhood Care, mandated in the constitutional reform that recognized early education as a right. This strategy must be relaunched, strengthened and consolidated to ensure that every child has access to the goods and services they require to guarantee full and comprehensive development, and that their families have all the support required to facilitate, enable, empower and support them in the titanic task of parenting.
Our two presidential candidates, engineers, women and mothers, cannot be satisfied with traditional policy visions where children are incidental, accessory, or secondary. We expect more, much more from them.
Candidates, let's make Mexico the best place to be born: make early childhood a priority. You will not regret it.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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