For Our Babies: Ending the Invisible Neglect of America's Infants

J.Ronald Lally’s latest book For Our Babies: Ending the Invisible Neglect of America’s Infants is available April 2013. The book shares the hopes, worries, and frustrations of American parents, who receive little support for their children or themselves as parents. It also reveals their lack of awareness about how little assistance they receive compared to parents in other countries.

In addition, the book provides crucial testimony from developmental psychologists, child care providers, health and mental health professionals, economists, specialists in brain development, and early learning educators. The book addresses how U.S. policy and practices must change if all parents are to raise children to be physically and emotionally healthy and productive members of society. Reserve your copy today through WestEd!

Here’s what people are saying:

“Lally is right. Our economy and our society will be stronger if public policies do more to help raise healthy babies. I applaud his tireless efforts to increase national awareness about the critical importance of improving early childhood development for all families.”
—U.S. Congressman George Miller (D-CA-11)

“Dr. Lally’s book sensitively captures the tension in knowing that infants at birth are both full of unlimited developmental potential and at the same time desperately dependent on their surroundings. And, thankfully, it is filled with ways to act on his informed and urgent plea for action to change policy and practice.”
—Carol Brunson Day, President, Brunson Phillips & Day, Inc.

“Professor Lally draws on a lifetime of working with infants to review and synthesize the research about the importance of the first 3 years of life, and what babies need—especially from their relationships with parents and caregivers—to thrive developmentally and socially. He then paints a disturbing picture of how present policies are failing young children—the invisible neglect. This book is a ‘must read’ for all who care about young children and their future.”
—Frank Oberklaid, Director, Centre for Community Child Health, Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne

“This is a clarion and moving call on behalf of our most vulnerable and valuable citizens, our amazing babies. It gathers together the freshest and broadest knowledge of what they need to flourish and contrasts this to the myriad ways our policies and practices consistently fail them. For Our Babies is an energizing, enlightening, and wholly loving book.”
—Jeree Pawl, Clinical Pyschologist, Board of Directors, Zero to Three

“Lally and others, including some of the economists cited in this book, have shown how investments in quality early education and preventive healthcare will more than pay for themselves when children reach adulthood. . . . This book is a starting place for urgently needed dialogue that will finally lead to action.”
—From the Foreword by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow, Harvard University

Reserve your copy today through WestEd!