Human beings need to love and to be loved.
A young child’s need for loving care and attention is fundamental and universal. It’s a simple fact. So simple, it’s simplistic. Obvious.
Obvious, but we allow 935 million of our young to grow up without it.
Through long years of helping the Chinese government and its welfare workers re-imagine how to best care for orphaned and abandoned children, OneSky has found a way to reach hurt children in their most formative years.
By developing an easy-to-replicate approach to early learning and responsive care, and by training adult caregivers how to offer every child the kind of consistent nurturing interaction and stimulation all children need, we’ve found a simple way to let once-neglected children know what love feels like, let them know empathy and find the source of their own resilience—to let them know that their lives matter. Once that gift is given it can never be taken away. The gift of loving care is transformative—a simple gift that lasts a lifetime.
And here is something else we’ve found… something we didn’t suspect back in 1998 when we began creating our first children’s centers: When children who are born into adverse circumstances overcome their unlucky beginnings with the help of caring adults, something special happens. Those children seem to develop extraordinary resilience, empathy, depth of character— qualities not always so evident in children born of privilege. Qualities that, when offered in abundance, just might change our troubled world.
The fate of our most vulnerable children will impact the future of us all. A generation of children who grow up cherished will cherish the generation that comes after. A world full of cherished children may be the true solution for these troubled times.
