Parent-Child Mother Goose Program

The program is a joyful group experience for parents and their babies or two-to-four-year-olds. If vulnerable, well-meaning parents do not emotionally bond or expressively communicate with their young children, the parent-child relationships and the children’s futures can be compromised. The Parent-Child Mother Goose Program® intervenes to prevent this outcome with a physically close and interactive program in which parents and children learn to share the power and pleasure of oral rhymes, songs, and stories. The approach is backed by decades of research, yet is so simple and natural that parents effortlessly gain the skills and confidence that foster healthy relationships during their children’s crucial early years, and their children acquire a foundation for lifelong emotional, physical, and cognitive development. All children’s early experiences mold their brains, and the primary caregiver provides most of those experiences. The caregiver’s choice of words, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, holding, and cuddling lay the neurological foundation for the child’s lifelong emotional, physical, and cognitive health. Because the peaks in a child’s brain development for literacy, numeracy, social skills and emotional control all occur from ages one to three, the quality of the primary caregiver’s responsiveness is the most crucial element in this process, and the changes to a child’s brain around this period are unlikely to be reversed. As a result, the return on investment during and close to this period is greater than for any other time in a person’s life. Because Parent-Child Mother Goose initiated a training and certification process for Parent-Child Mother Goose Program teachers nation-wide and internationally in 1991, the organization has brought the benefits of the program to many thousands of parents, babies and young children in every province in Canada as well as Afghanistan, Australia, China, Ecuador, and Iran.