The Earliest Years Matter: Talking ACEs and Influencing the Future of Health with Jackie Wong of First 5 California

What if the key to solving some of the biggest health challenges young people face today started long before they even set foot in a classroom?

We will explore how early childhood experiences shape lifelong health including our genetics and biology. From the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to the hidden struggles many families face, we’re diving deep into the root causes of health disparities and mental health challenges.

If you care about building a healthier future for the next generation, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Transcript

0:00  
Music. Welcome to a new type of conversation with each episode, we'll meet with inspiring people sharing best practices at the forefront of creating change for our young people, we'll talk motivations that make a difference in how their lived experience can help empower us to take action and make a difference in the lives of young people where we live. My name is CJ Sturmer, and this is the champions for you podcast.

0:35  
Have you ever wondered about the root cause of health issues in young people, or what drives them to make unhealthy decisions. In this episode, we talk with Jackie Wong, the executive director of First Five California, to explore why the earliest years of a child's life are the most critical for their future and the challenges these families are facing during this crucial time. Join us as we take a deeper dive into the truth shaping lifelong health that what happens to us in early stages of life, including things like adverse childhood experiences, are causing long term health issues that it's changing our genetics, our actual biology, and it's greatly impacting our physical and mental well being as we approach adulthood. Through her lived experience, Jackie will challenge us to think differently and feel empowered to take an actionable role in shaping a healthier future for the next generation. Tell us a little bit about first five. What is first five and what is their goal?

1:25  
We're about 25 years old, so we can now rent a car. Yay, us, right? We were established half of a California proposition, Proposition 10, which is essentially a syntax on tobacco. And so at the time, spearheaded by the chair Rob Reiner that it was important for for California and us to elevate the importance of early childhood and investments that needed to be made, because at that time, those in charge looked a little bit differently than me knew and had different lived experiences. So the focus was to create a funding stream to really invest in early childhood. Specifically, there was a strategic investment to have a significant portion of our funds go to outreach and parent education, because we know that when we invest in media and public education, you make the ground fertile for those conversations about early childhood investment. And our mission is actually to create those conditions and environments where children, ages 05 their families and communities can thrive and be successful. Why

2:26  
that age group? What is it that specifically around that time period in a human's life makes it such an important significance to really focus on when it comes to public health, a lot of

2:36  
people don't realize that 90% of your brain actually develops by age five, 80% by age three, and even in utero, your brain is developing at rapid paces, where you get 2 million synapses a minute, in terms of the things that are kind of happening as your your nervous system is building, the arms are growing, the fingers, all of that. So really, it's a really critical time in the life cycle, if you will. That really sets kind of the trajectory for the rest of the life course and the lifespan. What

3:09  
are some of the common public health issues that we usually see that are within that age group that

3:15  
we should be paying attention

3:16  
to? I think there's a large number of things. One of the things that First Five California is focused on is the impact of the toxic stress response released during times of adverse childhood experiences, right? So when you think about what I just shared, that again, 90% of the brain is developed by age 580, by age three, is that there is a lot going on, developmentally, hormonally, as as children and children are growing, and what ACES is is as we know, the Kaiser study done in the 1900s late 1900s granted from the CDC and the Kaiser and Kaiser, which really just was highlighting kind of these 10 indicators that they Were trying to figure out what created these chronic disease, diseases, right? High blood pressure, early heart attacks, high rates of suicidal ideation or suicide, right, things that actually shorten our lifespan. So that was their, you know, kind of the trajectory of this research, if you will, and what they realized they came up with 10 different factors in, you know, kind of abuse, neglect and just household challenges, whether there was somebody with a mental illness or separation from a primary caregiver, like divorce or other kind of stressful and traumatic things, they realized that if you had a certain a score, you were had a higher likelihood of being obese, right, of having diabetes, of having suicidal ideation and being successful in dying by suicide, right? Really deep things. So they kind of wanted to actually unpack that and go upstream. And what we learned is that aces, you know, again, it's not what happened. Is, you know what happened, isn't who defines what defines you, right? We've heard that a lot about ACEs and trauma. You know trauma research, it really is something that you can buffer against. So as you're you know as you're a child, even in utero when you're growing up. Is that for us, really educating parents and caregivers and community members about what you can do to buffer against average child experience, so you don't have these long term, you know, these long term chronic diseases that shorten your lifestyle, right? And you know what I've always told people is, like, it's so easy for us to go to a doctor and say, Hey, can I get this pill? Can I get that pill? Oh, I have an ache. I have a pain. And, you know, I'm a trained social worker, so like a lot of times, what I said, it used to be psycho. It's psychosomatic. A lot of it, you can't pinpoint what it is, but what we now know with the research is there's a biological response to stressful situations, right? And so even though we're here talking about babies, really understanding that we can buffer against this during youth and young adulthood is really something that we are, you know, we're wanting to promote, right, really healing the children inside ourselves. I know it might be sound cliche coming from a social worker that we are carrying these, these babies who had all these experiences that we we may have suppressed and don't remember, but the fact is that we feel it in our bodies. Have you ever been in those moments where, like, there's a situation and you don't know why you're reacting to it, but you feel the toxic stress response overcoming you, right? And you have a reaction that you can't quite figure out why you're having that reaction to, sometimes crippling really, like the fight or flight response Exactly. That is actually, actually our systems are built to protect us. So it's really, thank you so much for bringing that up. It's like we are going up the fight flight or freeze mode, right? Which is really great when you're in a, you know, kind of walking along in the forest or a dangerous situation and you see a rattlesnake, he's like, Oh my gosh, okay, freeze or go like that. Makes a whole lot of good sense. We don't see rattlesnakes every day, but we do different types of metaphorical rattlesnakes, right? Yeah, of the things that are triggering us, like, and we know now today, like it's evolved since the late 1900s that there are other environmental factors like racism or bullying and other things that actually have, what you know, kids call today, that the trigger responses, right? Like, why am I reacting this way? You're in a neighborhood where you're feeling just generally unsafe. Everything could be fine at home, but your body's releasing this hormone to protect you, and so it's toxic stress. It's a horm, it's a biological response to your environment, and it's actually it's killing us when we don't acknowledge what's happening to us and that we're not creating those safe, stable, nourishing relationships and environments that are absolutely necessary for healthy development for all children. You

7:54  
said something, I think, raise some good point. It's the longevity of how that stays with us, even you know us that are

8:03  
further through life. Why?

8:09  
Miles on our car? Yes, absolutely, yeah. So yes, it is something. And again, it's our it's our response, right? It's our biology, right, that we carry in us, and we have been for a very long time. I am, you are. You know, people out in the world are, but what we taught in the world is suppress and go to the doctor and go ask for that, that medication that will kind of build a sense of them. And I'm not saying that there isn't a space for medication, there is absolutely and those medications are based off of biological response. But if we are thinking about again, going back to my experiences, like, is it psychosomatic? Why am I? Why am I, you know, why am I having this pain right now in this moment and trying to understand what's happening with me physically, it can help me better address those situations in the future.

9:03  
And the thing that also is kind of, as you were thinking that was kind of resonating my head, is, is mental health, right? The overall, I'm going to say, quote, idea of mental health. And the reason I say that is because what I'm often finding is that people say mental health, and they bring up mental health as this just sort of broad brush strokes of, oh, we have to think about all the things in the way that affects us, in our stress, but we're talking about something that's really deep rooted into our lived experience for our entire life. It's not just, oh, I had a stressful day. Yeah, it's

9:31  
not about And granted, there are stressful we're talking about the epigenetics, like you bring I didn't even talk about this earlier, prolonged exposure to the toxic stress response changes your DNA, there's something negative that actually hinders and stops or slows down that development and growth because of that hormone that is being being released over and over and over again. The reality of our campaign and what we're doing right now is understanding the double tap you said, like digging deeper. As to what mental health is, because there's a stigmatism, right? And what we have shown and culturally like, that's just, it's just a stigmatism across different communities. And what we have done in our focus group, as we kind of went down this, you know, opportunity to educate folks about adverse childhood experiences is it just, it's the biology, but that requires adaptation, and that adaptation is a cognitive response. And you know, some of you know some psychologists that we are trained on cognitive behavioral like, modifications, right? But you think about what that is, it is changing how our brains are being wired.

10:36  
You're giving me the whole Bill Nye, and I'm just like, really starting to connect all these dots of, like, different pieces that we knew, and really kind of looking at, again, at the whole person you speak so passionately about this, and I absolutely, I could listen to you all day talk about this. It's very, very informative. Where did this kind of come from? You mentioned that you're a trained social worker, like, where did this passion to to do this work and to be in this field? Where does that come from for you?

10:59  
Well, I'm a refugee kid, okay, right from Vietnam. And there's just a lot of environmental issues and things that I grew up with, and I, you know, and I went into social work for a reason, right? Wanting to give back, trying to understand what was happening with me, my community members and my people, if you will. Because if you know, a lot of people think refugees are immigrants. No, they're not. It's a little bit different. Like, when you're a refugee, you pick up with you just pick up and you go. So my parents came here with nothing in their 20s. Can you imagine in your 20s? Like, yeah, just with two, two little children on the way, and kind of navigate this world, right? And so, but also culture at the time, like, you know, being a Asian, American, Southeast Asian is that we are not supposed to talk about our we were supposed to achieve, and not talk about any traumas. But I was a little bit different, really trying to unpack and understand. So I went down this path of being a trained, you know, a social worker. So both, you know, both in my undergraduate and as a as a graduate, as an MSW, and I had the opportunity to work in kind of different neighborhoods, in the Bay Area, in, you know, in West Oakland, and had all the environmental factors that we're talking like aces and all of the things. So you have lived experience. I have lived experience. And I grew up in Stockton. That's a whole nother story. But by the way, across the bay, when this was happening, of the CDC and Kaiser was coming out, so about the same time. But really trying to understand, what is it about this environment that kept young people, people in the conditions that they were in? Like, what was it, right? What were the triggers? And I just didn't have I was, quite frankly, a little bit kind of frustrated with like, we can do better. What is the preventative measure? What is the preventative measure? The high rates of incarceration, often we do all a lot of things on the back end. But the truth is, when I began to understand and know the research around adverse childhood experiences, a light bulb came out like, oh my gosh, this it makes sense. Yeah, right, why some of the families and young people that I was working had certain challenges to kind of make decisions or things were happening in their lives, but this light bulb like, it's the biological it's we're living in a toxic environment, and we're continually cutting, you know, children, youth and families, from those safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments from a policy and systemic level, yeah, right, like the things that we like from a, I mean, and it's very, let's just be honest, um, healthcare is very deficit based, right? So we're always applying a negative frame right to this, right, because something's wrong with you. But if you understood that it was a biological response to something that's empowering, that they're doing this, and how we say it is, we call it resilience, but we're built like we are built to protect ourselves. Do you know how deep that is? Like, yeah, literally from the origin, from moon, right? Like, this is a, this is a fight or flight response. But too much of anything is not a great deal. So for me, I'm so passionate about because a light will come. Like, oh my gosh, if I could just spread the word about what this is. And when you talk to you know, when you actually realize, the former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Doctor Robert block, says this is the single greatest unaddressed public health issue in the nation. It runs deep. It's like, why? What? What is it about this issue that is it too complex? It is right. So we have a mental health statement, you know, going on. So we talk about mental health, but the truth is, what is keeping us from just shouting from the roof rooftops, educating people about ACEs and the ability within your own environment to buffer and heal against that environment that was. Negative when you were in utero. Why

15:01  
do you think that is? Why do you think that we can't seem to get this more of like, Hey, we're plugging this block in. It seems very siloed. Like, this is an issue, and this is an issue, but we're why? Because

15:13  
humans want to create a schematic that's understandable, and they want to box things in, and it's challenging for us to complicate our thinking around what, what the holistic response is, because this isn't just a mental about mental health or physical health, right? It's about changing communities and mindsets that, I mean, we know what it feels like, What joy feels like. We know what love feels like, right? And it sounds so cliche, is sometimes, you know, I've had an interesting career in public policy, and I teach. It is like some and I, you know, have a long history where working with children, and, you know, in the child welfare system is I, sometimes I just sit there and say, can we just legislate love? And it's, it seems cliche, but then here is the science behind it. The safe, stable nursing relationship environment is that that's what it is. And and the end, the research is there about the simple things of, you know, being present for somebody, hugging somebody, yeah, like a 10 second hug? Yes, I can tell you, it makes a difference. It's not a two second it's a 10 second hug, right? It is in those stressful situations, realizing that, oh, you've been triggered, and you're about to, like, say something, I'll just speak for myself, like, Oh, this is how I was raised. I, you know, I need to check myself and not yell at my kid and have the same response, right? But when I know better, I do better stay calm, because I'm the adult in the room, and I'm going to transfer this, the this toxic stress, or this, really, you know, this issue, onto my child as I'm raising them, right? So the more you know, the more you're like, Okay? Because I know that. You know, my parents didn't have the tools. And you know, people are still afraid of talking about mental health, but they will talk about a body's response to a situation

16:56  
interesting, right? Like, so it's very much like, are you okay? But we're not talking about, Am I okay,

17:00  
right? Like, the mental health is just, it'll, you know, to some degree, would be stigmatized, but when you start to break down the biology and what we talked about the interactions, there's a little bit of like, oh, and we learned that in our focus groups, right, right, that people wanted to understand the science behind this,

17:15  
right? People want to do more. Mental health is

17:18  
becoming, you know, more normalized in conversations, it is hard to sort of either get past some red tape or trying to do more with so little. How can we make a difference? What can we do to empower on a local level, to think sort of with this mindset, pivot out of that box that we're used to. How can we do more with often so little?

17:44  
I think it takes courage to admit that you don't know what you don't know, because oftentimes, in our silos, we're so, you know, used to doing the thing and creating those habits of practice, like I'm always going to do this, because I've always done it this way, and my and my mentor told me to teach it this way, and I and their mentor told me, and it feels comfortable, but doesn't necessarily feel right. Like comfort doesn't like you can always for me, having worked in, in and out of government for quite some time, is that, how do you disrupt the system? Right? That there's always that. That old adage is, is the system created for the outcomes we see now, which aren't great for children or or, you know, humans like and are you okay with it? Because if you're okay with it, then okay go on with your life, and we'll still have extremely negative outcomes, right for our society and community. But if you're not okay with it, then we have to begin to unpack what the root causes are that is keeping us from a healthier society and world,

18:45  
right? It's why people want to get into the public health or social work space to begin with. Like you realize there's something that needs to happen, but we need to either our own biases or what we think is the right way and put that aside. And what you're saying is that we we kind of need to change the approach. Get uncomfortable, being uncomfortable. You work in here because you want to fix something. In order to fix something, you can't just do it the way it's always been, or you're not going to fix

19:09  
it. No, I think it's a really good perspective, and it's hard to think about that in government, right, right? Of like disrupting all the rules and regulations. And even when I was in government, I guess I'm actually in government. Sorry, I am actually in government now. But different types of large government I've been in large government agencies, is that I'd always say, why is the rule there for what reason, and when was it created, and who does it benefit? And can we change it? Yeah, and who do I talk to? Do we change? I mean, there was, you know, there have been laws the child welfare system over time, and I remember one time someone just said it takes an act of Congress. I was like, anyway, social worker, like, oh my gosh, that means that it'll never get but you know what? I mean, yeah, you went to

19:53  
Congress, yes, yeah. So the only way to disrupt is to ask the question,

19:57  
to ask the question and be brave enough and be consistent. Enough to see the vision to be keep on asking for the change.

20:04  
Should we empower people to, like, continuously ask for help? Absolutely,

20:07  
I even, and I'm a big proponent of those who were trying to to serve we should engage. We should wholeheartedly engage in if you want to change the lives of young people and disrupt the system, why are we not asking young people? Why are they not at the table with us? Having to humble yourself, saying, like, I don't know what I don't know. But let's ask the people who I'm trying to target. Let's bring them into this conversation for the solution. And I, you know, there was a situation where I was talking to some young people. I had the opportunity to talk to young people actually about mental health, right? Like juniors and seniors, actually sophomores high schools to kids right about something that was going on, and they had said, like, that's the biggest thing, Jackie, believe us and trust us. And then when I went back to the group of adults who like, was, I was just sharing their perspective, the adult said, Well, if we could trust them, then they we want to have to create this rule like, and all I said was, like, all I'm sharing is their perspective. But there is, I mean, there is a mindset in the system, in the public health, you know, in the health system, that I know better because this, this has been created. So this is the way it is right. We've had all these rules us that trust us like trust that we know what we need and what something so simple to ask, you're right, because I get in because it's a culture, this culture of healthcare and government systems, we can get caught up in our own rules, because it's tiring. Fighting against against things that have been built not it's exhausting swimming against waves built for us, but not by us.

21:37  
What does the future look like?

21:39  
Like? What should we really be paying attention? How do we empower everyone, sort of in our industries?

21:45  
Yeah, to think about the future going

21:48  
off of young people, I was very hopeful for our future. I was very they're better than us. I don't know if it's because the social media connections around the world, but I think about, let's get out of our young people's way. They are better than us because they are thoughtful, right? They're engaged. They want to build that better society, and they want to challenge us, to disrupt the system, to stop doing the things that we know are not good for them. And we need to listen, and we need to make those risky decisions that are not part of the industry, that are not things that we've always done for 20 years, because we've always done them, we need to question whether or not this is yielding the outcome that we want for our future. So I believe that I am hopeful about the future, because those young people are coming into our respective systems and are challenging people like me in authority,

22:46  
quite frankly, whether that be through voting or sitting at the table

22:50  
or sitting for something, asking for something, and for us in positions of influence and power, of Giving them a shot of possibly real consideration of changing our habits of practice a

23:05  
lot to reflect on. Thank you so very much. I'm so grateful that we had this time together. You really genuinely gave me a lot to think about, and really gave me some aha moments of my own. I agree, and I see even some things a little bit differently now, even from whether it be from a scientific perspective or whatever the case might be. So thank you for taking the time. Director Wong, I sincerely appreciate you sitting down with me today. Well, thank you for having me now. I get it. It's never too late or too early, for that matter, to change our mindset and challenge the way we've always done things. Thank you to the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth and prevention connections for their continued support, and to Mauricio Reyes from teleconnect with a great intro music. Be sure to check out our other episodes, and don't forget to share with others. The only way we can make real changes if we do it together. We're a few episodes in now, we'd love to know what you think. And hey, a quick five star rating goes a long way. And remember, no matter what you do in this world, go out there and go do good. Thanks for listening today, everybody. We'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai