Most people know the old adage that children are the future, but at the 2013 Virgin Islands Policymakers Summit on Early Childhood Investment on St. Croix Monday, visiting scholars sought to prove that point with scientific research.

The statistics may have been dreary after a while, but the event focused on the real need for educating and engaging with children during their most impressionable time, from the womb till their fifth birthday. The panelists presented reams of evidence suggesting that children who receive adequate attention during their earliest years develop a greater capacity to learn and can expect higher paying jobs and better health later in life.

But the benefits are not just for the children. The panelists also argued that the territory as a whole would reap the benefits of investing in early childhood education in terms of lower crime, fewer incarcerated youth, healthier citizens and more entrepreneurial young people.

Judi Richardson, co-director of Kids Count USVI, summed up the message of the event with a quote from Frederick Douglass.

“It is far easier to build strong children than repair broken men,” she said.

The event attracted a who’s-who list of government policy makers from a range of different departments, including Christopher Finch, commissioner of human services, Dr. Louis Petersen, commissioner of agriculture, and Maj. Gen. Renaldo Rivera of the V.I. National Guard.

Gov. John deJongh Jr. was also on hand for opening remarks, declaring the territory had “no choice” but to focus on early childhood education. He said investing in our youth would provide the Virgin Islands with a way to combat many of its long-term social and economic problems.

“If we want to stop the young people from going to YRC, if we want to stop the gang violence we have in our community, if we want to stop the growth in dropout rates, if we want to stop our Virgin Islands folks from just asking for jobs and not creating businesses, then it starts right here,” he said.

But why is it so critical to teach children early?

Judy Cameron, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Universtiy of Pittsburgh and a respected expert on child development, explained that during the first five years of life, children produce neural pathways at a lightning-fast pace.

This brain development slows as children grow older, and eventually they reach a “pruning” stage in which the total number of pathways actually decreases. The strongest, most used ones survive, while weaker ones disappear.

This process, she said, establishes the brain’s basic architecture, and it has a far greater effect on a person’s capabilities later in life than their genetic makeup.

She said the key to encouraging your child’s brain development is surrounding them with caring, supportive relationships. She said that babies learn through a “serve and return” process in which the baby attempts to communicate through a coo or facial gesture, and the parent then responds.

Cameron said positive interactions between children and their parents are key to encouraging the growth of pathways. She said parents should frequently speak to their children, even when they’re too young to understand.

Later, parents should read to their children and play games with them. She stressed the need for parents to be consistent in their approach.

“You can’t provide a caring relationship once and have it be effective over their childhood. It’s a process,” she said.

Cameron also warned that negative interactions can have an opposite effect on brain development. She said that children who are subjected to “toxic” levels of stress, such as abuse victims and neglected children, develop far fewer pathways than normal children.

This makes them ill-equipped for learning at school and could lead to health issues far later in life, she said.

Certainly there is room for improvement. Richardson read some of the statistics from the last Kids Count survey to the crowd, and it painted a grim picture.

She said that 30 percent of children in the Virgin Islands were living in poverty, compared to the national average of 22 percent – and the U.S. figure is among the highest in developed countries. She added that the territory’s number may be low, because it is based on the federal poverty line and the cost of living in the islands is much higher than on the mainland.

She went on to say that half of all families with children in the territory are single-mother households. Of them, half are below the poverty line.

She said there was evidence that these living conditions were having an impact on children’s learning capabilities. The survey found that one in three kindergarten students are below age expectations in cognition skills.

These deficiencies appear to be having an impact on learning later in life as well. She said that 43 percent of the territory’s fifth, seventh, and eleventh grade public school students were below grade level in math and 62 percent were below grade level in reading.

“Our children are starting off behind, and they’re not catching up,” Richardson said.

Later in the day, the conversation turned to funding. Rob Dugger, a retired venture capital investor and chairman of the Ready Nation Advisory Board, a group that advocates for early childhood education, made the case that in the long run investing in youth pays for itself.

He cited a study that compared investments made in early childhood education to other revenue generating strategies used by cities, such as building stadiums or tech centers, and found it to be on par or better.

The theory is that it is simply cheaper to pay up front. Dugger said that municipalities that support childhood education and thereby prevent certain social problems recoup their investment through lower costs related to programs aimed at trying to fix those problems later on, such as incarcerating minors, job training programs, welfare and the like.

He also said it was possible to attract private money to fund public initiatives, such as the Head Start pre-K program, by offering social investment bonds. These bonds would use a portion of the municipality’s savings to pay back investors.

Dee Baecher-Brown, president of the Community Foundation of the V.I. and one of the event’s organizers, said that the funding issues was especially key in the Virgin Islands given the territory’s financial situation.

She said she hoped to get the symposium’s message out to private business owners and win them over to the idea that a greater investment in children today will benefit them in the long run.

“Families who have children who have excellent child care do better financially,” she said. “It’s really amazing what a difference it can make for a community. And it really does affect the overall financial success.”