When Rob Reiner Taught America About Early Childhood Development

Revisiting a very successful narrative change effort on a very sad day

Note: By bizarre coincidence, I drafted the below post last week. I was stunned to see the awful, tragic news yesterday about the killings of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner. I never met Reiner, but I’m a longtime admirer of both his movies and his activism. I’m still sending out the post, slightly updated, because I think it’s a good way to honor part of Reiner’s legacy that not everyone knows about.

Back in April 1994, a Carnegie Corporation-funded task force released a groundbreaking report called Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children. The report opens starkly: “Across the United States, we are beginning to hear the rumblings of a quiet crisis. Our nation’s children under the age of three and their families are in trouble, and their plight worsens every day.” The report goes on, still on the first page:

Babies seldom make the news: they do not commit crimes, do drugs, or drop out of school. We don’t hear interviews with parents as they anguish over finding decent, affordable child care; we don’t notice the unmet prenatal needs of expectant mothers. Policymakers are rarely forced to contend with these realities. And so, the problems of our youngest children and their parents remain a quiet crisis.

Almost exactly three years later, in April 1997, ABC aired an hour-long prime-time special on early childhood development in the first three years of life. It was hosted by none other than Tom Hanks, and check out this absurd list of guest celebrities:

• Mel Brooks

• Billy Crystal

• Michael J. Fox

• Charlton Heston

• Jon Lovitz

• Rosie O’Donnell

• Shaquille O’Neal(!)

• General Colin Powell(!!)

• Rob Reiner

• Martin Short

• Roseanne

• Alex Trebek

• Robin Williams

• Oprah Winfrey

Oh, and President Bill Clinton alongside First Lady Hillary Clinton to round it out!

The special was viewed by over 9 million Americans.¹ The issue of early childhood was quiet no more. So what in the world happened?

The late Rob Reiner deservedly gets a lot of the credit here. Inspired by the Starting Points report — and of course with other influences involved as well — he leveraged his celebrity and clout to launch the I Am Your Child (IAYC) campaign. (Reiner would also go on to help lead 1998’s winning Prop 10 campaign in California that directed tobacco taxes to early childhood development and created the First 5 network.) From what I have learned from both publicly available sources and talking to many of those helping lead the effort, what was perhaps most impressive about the project was its sheer ambition. IAYC set out to change the way the country saw young children, and they had a plan to do so.

It wasn’t just the prime-time special. The campaign produced PSAs, and they produced a series of half-hour educational videos on topics ranging from neural development to how to think about child care quality — again hosted not by scientists or news anchors, but by folks like Levar Burton and Gloria Estefan. As a Washington Post reviewer wrote of the prime-time hour, “If watching Shaquille O’Neal sing ‘The Eensy Weensy Spider’ will inspire some mom or dad to do the same, fantastic. And it’s certainly useful for the word to get out that babies are not just blobs, that the neural pathways are being laid down in the first three years -- and thus shaping the brain and temperament for a lifetime.”

Nor did the campaign content itself with audiovisual mediums. It also helped to produce a special edition of Newsweek — back when people still read print magazines! — entitled “Your Child: From Birth to Three.” Per one researcher, “It was a ‘massive success,’ selling around 1 million copies with many overseas sales. It went through several printings, ‘and news vendors could not keep it in stock’.

I want to emphasize how coordinated and sophisticated this campaign was. My understanding is that there were weekly media strategy calls across participating organizations. Another researcher, writing back in July of 1997, summarizes:

Outreach for the “I Am Your Child” Campaign is based at the Families and Work Institute in New York, headed by Ellen Galinsky, and funded by more than a dozen major foundations and corporations. The campaign is organized on four levels: national media, public policy, national organizations, and state and local coalitions. On the national media front, the campaign has included special features on other ABC programs, including a five-part series on Good Morning America, a five-part series on Today, wrap-around footage for local affiliates, a Newsweek special edition (Newsweek 1997), public service announcements, a video for parents, a CDROM, and a web site (www.Iamyourchild.org). A White House conference, Early Childhood Development and Learning, was timed to coincide with the launch of the campaign on April 17, 1997. There is also a public policy agenda, and the campaign to date includes work with 128 national organizations and coalitions in all fifty states. The campaign has generated significant news coverage of children’s brain development and the importance of the first three years of life, and further media projects on early childhood development are under consideration.

(I should also be clear that IAYC was far from the only game in town — there were certainly other advocacy coalitions at work during the 1990s, including the Child Care Action Campaign and a ton of work in D.C. largely spearheaded by the Children’s Defense Fund. I’m focusing here on IAYC’s media work because of its impact on narrative change)

I think it’s instructive to look back at I Am Your Child both because it’s a neat story not everyone knows anymore, and because it suggests the contours of what a campaign to reshape narratives around care might need to look like. Obviously not in particulars — prime-time TV specials aren’t quite as much a thing anymore! — but in the sheer level of coordinated, comprehensive, sustained, multimedia action taken in service of a measurable attitudinal change goal. As we’ve talked about frequently on The Family Frontier, there are persistent cultural narratives and mindsets that get in the way of truly centering and supporting care. Those attitudes need to change, and change doesn’t happen randomly. We could do a lot worse than to figure what an I Am Your Child-style campaign around care might look like in the mid-2020s — and we have Rob Reiner to thank for the example.

Programming Note: The Family Frontier will be on a brief hiatus over the holidays, back the first full week of January. Wishing you and yours a restful and connective time!

1. Far as I can tell, there is no digitized footage of the special available online at the moment. I’m working to try and get my hands on a copy!