The Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, has launched her new Centre for Early Childhood.
Part of the Royal Foundation, the centre will focus on impacting change and the understanding of children’s early years, through science and data-led research, campaigns and collaboration, all centred around the early years of life – from pregnancy all the way up to age five, which the centre says is an important period of development for children.
The official website for the centre outlines its ethos as “together we can build a happier, healthier, more nurturing world.”
“I’m proud to be launching The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood — let’s embrace this golden opportunity to create a happier, more mentally healthy and more nurturing society,” added the Duchess of Cambridge on her official Twitter account.
“We are born with billions of brain cells,” states the centre’s website, “however, it is the connections we make between these cells that help us to do everything from talking and walking to learning and reasoning. And these connections form most rapidly during early childhood – more than a million per second in the first few years.”
The project will tackle early childhood challenges through collaborations with people and organisations from private, public and voluntary sectors. The centre argues that investing now in child development is preferable to addressing issues later on in a person’s life, citing research from the London School of Economics that the cost of lost opportunity in England is £16.13 billion per year.
The Duchess of Cambridge is quoted as saying: “The early years are not simply about how we raise our children. They are about the society we will become.”
