In Culture Making, Andy Crouch offers a penetrating question to understand particular cultural goods like laws, inventions, and organizations: "What does this cultural artifact make possible?" For example, what do refrigerators make possible (that was previously impossible or very difficult)? They make the preservation of perishable food possible in a way that has dramatically affected public health. Together, Crouch argues, a society's many cultural artifacts define its "horizons of possibility."
Each new cultural creation (like the refrigerator), then, changes the horizons of possibility because it creates new possibilities. And so it is quite appropriate to ask, What does tumblon make possible?
- Tumblon makes it possible for parents to understand their children's development at each stage without formal training or extensive research.
- Tumblon makes it possible for parents to provide developmentally-appropriate nurture. This was certainly possible before, but came at a high cost of research time, whether through formal training, personal study or coaching from others.
Those are dramatic changes in the horizons of possibility, since parent involvement plays such a critical role in brain development, character formation and educational achievement. The costs associated with early childhood education were formerly highest for those whose time, education, resources and literacy were most limited because the most important information was most accessible to those with the time to read it, the initiative to find it, and the educational abilities to understand it. Tumblon has dramatically altered the cost of acquiring simple, timely, actionable child development information for the people who most profoundly affect child development: parents.
- Simple: By writing our developmental content in clear, simple language, critical information is easily accessible to people of diverse educational levels.
- Timely: By presenting parents only with relevant, important information for their children, no longer do parents have to find the right book, and the right page, at the right time in order to understand child development.
- Actionable: By recommending excellent children's literature, activities and toys appropriate for each child's stage of development, parents can not only understand, but also provide appropriate nurture at each stage at a very low cost. They can find the books in their public library, do the activities with household materials, and choose to purchase a few versatile, durable, open-ended toys.
Since the family is culture at its smallest - and most powerful - the impact of informing and inspiring parents is hard to overestimate.
