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Teaching one child to be a better student might help 25 classmates and a teacher.

But the same lesson can work like a lever to lift whole communities. And much of Missoula's child-development community turned out Tuesday to learn from Dennis Embry, a national expert in behavior improvement.

“The point is, you don't have to buy an enormous program to make change,” said Jori Frake, director of the Missoula Forum for Children and Youth and one of the conference organizers. “These are things that regular parents can do, but they're also more about making population-level changes.”

Embry's workshop focused on “simple gifts,” or ways to encourage good behavior and discourage anti-social activity. His goal is to reduce things such as underage sexual activity, substance abuse, bullying, violence and related youth challenges. While many of his strategies lean on well-established parenting advice, he argued that they have the potential to have much wider effects.

That's because new research into brain development can help adults refine the ways they try to change kids' behavior. Embry's studies indicate that rewarding positive behavior in children with praise or other small privileges can measurably improve reading levels and reduce the likelihood of abusing tobacco or drugs. The challenge is to encourage that kind of positive reinforcement on a community level, such as getting whole school systems to follow the philosophy.

“We've got 300 people right here who now know something about these low-cost strategies,” Embry said during a break in Tuesday's workshop in Missoula. “I want them to understand that money is never the barrier. It's the vision that's important.”

The vision went out to a long list of child advocates, including staff from Missoula County Public Schools, Head Start, Missoula Parks and Recreation Department, WORD, Flagship, Project Success and several foster parent and youth services programs.

Just as when doctors learned that simple hand-washing between surgeries made a dramatic improvement in their patients' survival, Embry said understanding how commonplace things affect brain activity can lead to big breakthroughs. One example he offered was research showing that foods with soybean or cottonseed oil can change the way the brain uses dopamine and serotonin, resulting in hostile or impulsive mood shifts.

“We're seeing that things like exercise and diet, personal contact and problem-solving are kernels of positive youth development,” said Mary McCourt, a community health specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department. “There's so much new information on brain development we can use to make a huge difference in children's lives.”

Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.

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