A legislative task force recently documented what many parents already knew: The most dramatic learning years for a child are the earliest. Lawmakers next week will have the chance to support a bill that does something useful with this information so that the greatest number of Maine children can benefit.

LD 2260, which directs state agencies to develop a plan to help family services, deserves enthusiastic legislative support. It is the next step in a long process between identifying where the state can be useful in supporting early childhood development and putting those ideas into practice. Specifically, the bill is a resolve that directs the commissioners of corrections, human services, education and mental health — called the Children’s Cabinet — to draft a fiscal plan for programs that are found to be effective.

Maine, of course, already has a plenitude of programs to help kids. LD 2260 has the Children’s Cabinet bring organization to the effort so that more children in need of these services can get better support. A few of the top programs mentioned in the resolve are Healthy Families, Communities for Children, Parents as Teachers and Parents are Teachers, Too. The names of the last two groups are particularly important because the ideas behind the legislation are as much about the crucial role parents play throughout a child’s life as about the children themselves.

In this era of subservience to experts, it is easy to belittle to role of the people who actually do the work, or ought to do it. When it comes to raising children, teachers are terrific and politicians prodigious, but they can’t begin to be effective without parents taking the lead. The truth is, however, that parenting is the biggest instance of on-the-job training around. This bill, presented by Rep. Tina Baker of Bangor, is an attempt to make sure that parents have resources at hand to do the best job they can.

The support should not begin and end with government. Everyone in the community has a stake in seeing that parents are able to do a good job, and there are many ways citizens and businesses can help. MBNA, for instance, will play host to a conference in May on brain development, with the goal of finding methods to provide healthy starts for young children. Similar conferences could not only impart important information but change the commonly held assumption that raising children is largely intuitive.

LD 2260 is a way for the Legislature to improve the chances that, whatever Maine does to help children, it does in a logical and consistent way. It’s a great start to improving kids’ lives.