[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 88 (Tuesday, June 28, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Page S7517]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO DR. PHYLLIS LEVENSTEIN

 Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, on May 28, New York and our 
Nation lost one of its finest child advocates, innovators, and 
clinicians. Dr. Phyllis Levenstein, longtime Wantagh, NY, resident and 
founder of The Parent-Child Home Program, an international early 
literacy, school readiness program, passed away shortly after returning 
to Long Island to celebrate the program's 40th anniversary.
  She was born Phyllis Aronson in Boston and grew up in Detroit. After 
graduating from Wayne State University in 1937, she taught in Detroit 
before coming to New York, where she earned a master's degree in social 
work in 1944 and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1969. She met 
her husband, Sidney Levenstein while working as a social worker in 
Manhattan during World War II. They married in 1946 and moved to 
Wantagh in 1957. Sidney, an Adelphi University Professor, who died in 
1974, helped Phyllis develop The Parent-Child Home Program model.
  In 1965, she identified parent-child interaction as the key to the 
development of early language skills and working with her husband, a 
statistician, created a pioneering model program. The Parent-Child Home 
Program, which Dr. Levenstein first piloted in Freeport, NY, in 1965, 
is a home-visiting program for families with 2- and 3-year-olds 
challenged by poverty and low levels of education. The program 
encourages parent-child verbal interaction through talking, reading, 
and playing and helps families create a language-rich environment in 
their homes. Longitudinal research shows that children who complete the 
2-year program enter school ready to learn and graduate high school at 
the same rate as middle-income students. The program that began serving 
just 5 Long Island families in 1965 will reach 5,000 disadvantaged 
families across the country this year.
  Dr. Levenstein's genius was in seeing the critical importance of 
parents engaging in continual verbal interaction with their young 
children through talking, reading, playing, and asking questions.
  Over the years, she conducted and published significant research on 
the program's design and outcomes. The 88-year-old clinical 
psychologist was working on an expanded edition of her 1988 book about 
parent-child verbal interaction, ``Messages from Home,'' when she 
passed away. A practicing clinical psychologist, Dr. Levenstein was in 
private practice in Wantagh for 44 years and continued to see patients 
up until her death. She also was affiliated with Stony Brook University 
and a number of Long Island mental health and child guidance centers.
  Dr. Levenstein was a fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric 
Association and the American Psychological Association and a member of 
the American Educational Research Association and the Nassau County and 
New York State psychological associations.
  Her children describe her as a person who derived true joy from 
helping people and say that her soft touch was well-matched by her 
scientific tough-mindedness. Her principled humanism led as well to a 
lifelong impassioned advocacy of peace and social justice. Her 
colleagues will remember her great intelligence, intensity, and wisdom, 
coupled with integrity, warmth, and humility.

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