Why the First Five Years Are Everyone's Business

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“If we change the beginning of the story, we change the whole story.”
—The Harvard Center on the Developing Child

Ask most people what leadership looks like, and they’ll picture a boardroom, a ballot box, or a principal’s office. But real leadership—transformational, generational leadership—starts on the floor of a preschool classroom.

The early years are not a warm-up. They are the foundation.
The science is clear: children’s brains are more adaptable, more absorbent, and more sensitive to environment in the first five years than at any other time in life. This window of opportunity is unmatched—and tragically, too often overlooked. That’s the why.

By the time a child turns five, their brain has already formed the majority of the neural connections that shape how they focus, regulate, learn, and relate to others. That development doesn’t wait for kindergarten.

Let’s put this in practical terms:

• A child’s capacity to control impulses and solve problems in second grade begins with how we scaffold frustration tolerance in Pre-K.
  
• The future workforce's creativity and resilience are tied to how we support open-ended play and secure attachment at age three.
  
• Academic gaps that emerge in third grade often stem from executive function gaps in toddlerhood—not a lack of curriculum, but a lack of regulation, working memory, or attentional flexibility.
  

Despite this knowledge, systems still fail to prioritize early childhood.

Preschool remains underfunded. Staff turnover is rampant. Policies treat early care like babysitting instead of brain-building. In fact, child care workers—often among the lowest-paid professionals in the country—are leaving in record numbers, citing burnout, lack of recognition, and post-pandemic stressors.

This isn’t just a workforce crisis—it’s a public leadership failure.

Because when we fail to recognize early educators as leaders, when we fail to invest in their training and compensation, we’re failing the very children who need the most.

There is both a moral imperative and an economic case for focusing on early childhood.

• Children from marginalized communities often face higher exposure to stress, instability, and under-resourced environments in their first five years. If we wait until third grade to intervene, it’s not just late—it’s unjust.
  
• According to economic research, high-quality early education yields one of the highest returns on investment of any public initiative—up to $13 for every $1 spent—through improved education outcomes, reduced remediation, and long-term societal gains.

If we care about equity, about outcomes, about leadership, about human dignity—we must care about the first five years.

This book is not about babies and blocks. It is about how we build culture, capacity, and courage—starting from the very beginning.

We all have a role to play:

• Educators are the architects of early minds.
  
• Leaders and principals are system designers, shaping the soil in which programs grow.
  
• Parents and caregivers are the emotional anchors and first teachers of every child.
  
• Policymakers and funders hold the keys to scalable, sustainable change.

“When we get the early years right, we don’t just change outcomes. We change lives.”

This is the “why” of The Earliest Edge:

To reframe early childhood as the leadership frontier of our time—scientifically, spiritually, and socially.