It was just a bad dream. It had to be.

The other day, I awoke with a startle response that felt for all the world like a panic attack. You know the symptoms, rapid breathing, pulse pounding and, often, fear.

In my mind’s dream I kept seeing lots of babies drowning in a river. The children were all colors, but more were “of color,” our nice way of saying that they were babies of Black and Hispanic heritage.  In my dream, some were infants and toddlers, and others were in their preschool and kindergarten years. None of them could swim against the tide.

It was just a bad dream. It had to be because, after all, this is Connecticut.

Connecticut is a great place to raise children, we are told.  We want families and businesses to come to our state because we have a great quality of life, vibrant communities, and a rich array of opportunity.  In fact, when we look across Connecticut’s 169 cities and towns, the ones ranked as best places to raise a family are all towns with greater economic capacity, assuring them the resources to invest in all of their children.

Connecticut is, overall, a very wealthy state that is consistently among the richest in the nation. Right now, we have a state budget surplus that exceeds $4 billion. Yet, we are also among the most unequal of states in the wealth and economic capacity of our people and families.

Connecticut is also an aging state. In fact, we are the seventh oldest state in the nation, with nearly 600,000 of our residents 65 years of age or older.  We need all of our young children to grow up healthy, on target in their development, to experience educational success and become the innovators, entrepreneurs and workers who fuel our economy.

It was just a bad dream. But what if it wasn’t just a dream…

In fact, Connecticut’s ranking on overall child well-being has dropped over the past two decades from third best to ninth. More than four in ten very young children may not be getting even one annual well-child developmental screening. Six in ten enter kindergarten and need substantial instructional help to be ready for the grand adventure of schooling, and half exit the third grade not reading well.

It was a bad dream for me, but it was also a parable for all of us.

Among social scientists and children’s policy advocates, we all know the parable of young children drowning in a river of poor health, unstable housing, bias and racism, and poverty.  Fishermen and villagers wait at the bottom of the river and try, repeatedly, to pluck them out before they drown.

Finally, they ask the two questions: Who keeps dumping these babies into the river, and wouldn’t it be smarter to just stop throwing them away in the first place?

We know how to protect and nurture children. But it will take a real commitment to create a multi-year, systems transformative investment in the early years to get us there.

To date, and for nearly two decades, Connecticut has put resources into the early childhood years on a program by program, year-to-year, silver-bullet basis. Even successful programs are not taken to scale before we move on.

A look back over the past nearly two decades shows that Connecticut actually had a plan for cross-sector early investment but fiscal and other headwinds stopped us in our tracks.

Today, we have the money, the data, and the state level leadership to make it right.  Four billion dollars in surplus is a good place to start, but we need to be both strategic and outcomes driven in our planning and commitments.

As we speak, the CT 359 Network’s Cost Modeling Guide Team of more than a dozen organizations is working on the first-ever CT Early Childhood Investment Portfolio. It will include proposals for multi-year funding across the early childhood ecosystem. And it should help both the executive and legislative branches of Connecticut government to more confidently plan, commit, evaluate and sustain early childhood investment opportunities.

It will address the cost of finally creating a network of existing data systems to track outcomes in real time as well the cost of strengthening a national model for service connection, Help Me Grow, that was actually invented in Connecticut but not sustained over time.

Legislators have already taken a first step by creating the CT Early Childhood Care and Education Trust in the Office of the State Treasurer. PA 24-91 can work as our “investment vessel” if modified in the coming General Assembly session to allow investment across the entire early childhood ecosystem, including but not limited to child care.

No more young children into the river, please.

Making a smart, sustainable investment in younger children and their families begins with baby steps. The Trust was the first. The Investment Portfolio is the next.

As a Connecticut elder and a grannie, I am too old to keep having these bad dreams. Thank you for helping me get back to a good night’s sleep.

Janice Gruendel is a developmental psychologist and co-founder of the CT 359 Network.