Child advocacy is a complex, often frustrating, and never ending process. One of the key ingredients of successful advocacy is to understand and take advantage of local issues that capture the imagination of the public or the media, and capitalise on this interest to influence public policy.

It is interesting to look at examples of how this has been done in different countries. In North America, much of the momentum that has developed in early childhood policy has stemmed from what might loosely be called “brain development research”. This is a mixture of old and new research showing that the first three years are especially important in influencing a child’s long term functioning. It has been suggested that the rapidly developing brain in the first three years is extremely vulnerable to environmental influences, both positive and negative. Long term physiological functioning of the brain is affected by subtle structural changes influenced by these environmental experiences. Hertzmann has called the young child’s brain “an environmental organ”, which captures beautifully the profound influence the …