"I'm not sure I like that metaphor!" Nathalie exclaimed. "I don't want to be burned at the stake!"
I had just compared Nathalie to Joan of Arc, the symbol - for me - of the person willing to trust their inspired vision "against all odds," the person not fazed by the prospect of being considered crazy if it can just help to advance awareness of a new reality about which the general population is only dimly aware.
Nathalie Casso-Vicarini is the creative genius behind France's Early Learning/Positive Parenting Awareness-Raising Train, which tomorrow will start its 3-week tour of fourteen cities and towns all around France, bringing cutting-edge neuroscience and positive parenting methodologies to parents, grandparents, and early childhood professionals across the country.
Nathalie and her team at the non-profit, Ensemble pour l'Education de la Petite Enfance (Ensemble for Early Childhood Education and Care) have worked tirelessly for months to put together the interactive exhibits that will fill the six-car train placed at their disposal by the French National Railroad (the SNCF), designed to provide visitors with an experience of what goes on in the developing brain of a young child.
“The advances in neuroscience and their implications for child-rearing are only just beginning to make inroads in France," Nathalie told me. "The benefit for us, however, is that the implications are now crystal clear – children require solid connections with their caretakers, they need support, stability and understanding, not criticism, humiliation and punishment - in order to thrive. The research that revealed this may have been done largely in the US, but in France, we intend to be hugely creative in our efforts to get the information out to the people who need it. And I believe we can truly excel at this and point the way for others. We have been able to mobilize tremendous public- and private-sector support for the project. The end goal is to change the parenting practices of the general population. And that’s what we intend to do.”
With unparalleled ingenuity, Ensemble pour l'Education has worked cooperatively with the municipal Early Childhood departments in each of the cities and towns where the train will stop to plan a host of seminars and workshops designed to supplement and amplify the information communicated by the train. Over the course of the train's trajectory, over 40,000 people are expected to participate in some form, visiting the train's exhibits and/or attending the various workshops and seminars on offer.
"We are going to have an impact," Nathalie states, with heartfelt conviction.
French law still upholds a "right of correction" making corporal punishment in the home lawful. Despite years of work to get legislation passed in France that would exclude from the rightful exercise of parental authority "all cruel, degrading or humiliating treatment, including any use of corporal violence,” an amendment to the Equality and Citizenship Law that was passed in 2016 was subsequently declared unconstitutional and annulled on a legal technicality. Recourse to what the French call "ordinary disciplinary violence" continues to be a mainstay of child-rearing, and current estimates are that close to 85 % of French children (12 million children) are subjected on a daily basis to this type of violent treatment.
In 2017, the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on life-long mental and physical health are far from being understood in France. But the Early Learning/Positive Parenting Train will go a long way toward raising awareness of child development, as well as both the disturbing impact of traumatic childhood experiences and the beneficial effects of nurturing and supportive child-raising and educational approaches.
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