A month earlier, Mom had watched closely as Devan carefully placed six little balls into a six-muffin tin. Then Parents as Teacher educator Ann Ahrendsen handed Devan a seventh ball. "He took one ball out of the muffin tin and put the seventh ball in there," says Brittney. "It was really amazing to watch him figure that out."

Brittney and Devan are enrolled in a Parents as Teachers demonstration project being piloted for two years through the University of Idaho Cooperative Extension System. Based on the national Parents as Teachers model, the free, voluntary program serves expectant parents and families of children under 3 years regardless of income.

Harriet Shaklee, UI extension family development specialist and a Parents as Teachers steering committee member, calls it a "readiness-to-learn program–but in this case we work with the parent to help the child."

During monthly home visits, parent educators teach parents about the changes occurring in their child’s rapidly developing brain. They bring children’s books, short videotapes on child development, and ideas for fun activities that encourage learning during that specific month of the young child’s life. Topic-oriented group meetings, links to community resources, and screenings for vision, hearing, language, and development supplement the home visits. Altogether, they form a cradle-to-classroom approach that independent researchers say boosts children ahead of their peers in language, social development, and problem-solving skills.

"Children are born to learn," says project coordinator Diane Demarest in Boise. "As their brains become organized to function for the rest of their lives, children undergo very rapid and dramatic brain growth and development." Indeed, a 6-month-old child’s brain is already half the size of an adult’s. By age 3, that brain is 80 percent of the size it will be at age 18. And as it develops, windows of opportunity open–and close–for learning intellectual, emotional, and motor skills.

Parents are children’s first and most influential teachers, says Demarest. That’s why it’s so important to share with parents how they can provide age-appropriate learning experiences for their infants and toddlers.

Parents as Teachers, already in 49 states, got its start in Idaho in 1998 through the Albertson Foundation. The UI demonstration project is designed to help evaluate the program’s effects and its fit with Idaho communities. The project is chaired by First Lady Patricia Kempthorne and funded through the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. It added 12 new sites to Idaho’s 30 existing programs, eight of which are supervised by UI extension educators.

Demarest views the link between cooperative extension and Parents as Teachers as a natural one. "The extension mission is to take research to people," she says. "We’re taking research to parents. And Extension has contacts all over the state–a natural network that’s already developed."

In Lewiston, Judy and David Clark wanted their year-old daughter Mariah to benefit from leading-edge research in child development. The Clarks have nine children–seven of them, like Mariah, adopted from foreign orphanages.

"I want to do the best I can with my kids because I have to compensate for the months they didn’t get one-on-one nurturing," says Judy Clark.

She credits the Parents as Teachers program with making her "mindful to make moments count. I will take a minute or two that I might not have taken in the past and get down on the floor at Mariah’s level. I’m trying to spend more time making eye contact, keep more music going, read more stories to her–and, basically, I’m just more focused on the time that I spend with her."

The Clarks’ parent educator, University of Idaho alumna Alicia Robertson, feels "blessed" to be able to help parents build this bond of learning with their children. Children learn the most from the people they love, she says, and that nurturing bond "gives the child the security to go out in the world and explore."

In each participating community, Parents as Teachers advisory councils assist in hiring parent educators. "We look for someone who is very respectful of other people, who doesn’t have one set way of parenting, who is a good listener, and who is comfortable going into a home and sitting on the floor," says consultant Jerri Wolfe. Each parent educator serves up to 19 families.

Juanita Hernandez, the program’s Spanish-language educator in American Falls, used to manage a 24-unit housing project for the Idaho Migrant Council. She understands the hand-to-mouth economic pressures that send Hispanic moms and dads out to work long hours each day, allowing little time to spend with their children.

"Children are learning, learning, learning," says Hernandez. But many parents "just get up and go to work, leave the child with a babysitter, and come back and hug the baby a little bit. Yes, it’s your child and you love it, but that’s not the same as actually playing with a child and understanding the stages it goes through and why it does certain things."

Steering committee member Beverly Montgomery, who is a state representative for District 10A, has spent the last 30 years observing changes in Idaho families. A retired Canyon County extension educator, Montgomery has also worked in child protective services and correctional schools.

"Many young parents have so many demands on their lives that they don’t take the time to sit and hold their babies and look right at them while they talk with them," says Montgomery. "And many of them have not had the kind of modeling themselves that would have prepared them to observe their children for developmentally appropriate behaviors. If we want to positively impact Idaho’s children, we really must support parents with educational resources." In Emmett, parent educator Michelle Welsh strives to support her families as units and to reinforce the relationship between parents. "A new baby is a huge amount of stress on a marriage," she says.

On each visit, Welsh brainstorms with parents about the child-rearing issues they have confronted that month. "I sit down with them and work through every one. How do you feel about time-outs, how does your child respond to them, how can we make this work better, what is a developmentally appropriate plan of action that we can use consistently." "If we can make parents more at ease in their job of parenting and give them more confidence in their role, then they’re going to be a stronger couple and it’s a win-win for everyone," says Welsh.

Demarest describes Parents as Teachers as a "strength-based, rather than a deficit-based, program. It’s about affirming parents, recognizing what families do well and building on that. It’s sensitive to the needs of all types of families."

In American Falls, Head Start teacher Rosanna Campbell says being a Parents as Teacher educator gives her "oodles of satisfaction." Being the greatest teacher in the classroom won’t make that much of a difference if circumstances at home don’t support learning, she says. "Parents are the child’s most important teacher—and they always will be."