Watching young children master making a tricycle go where intended is almost always worth a moment of quiet observation. “Almost,” because when these children have developmental delays, we are likely to feel discomfort at what a daunting and difficult task tricycle riding presents.

Four years ago, the Washington County Children’s Program moved to a new space just outside Machias; a long, narrow building, reincarnated from a blueberry factory. Now it is home to WCCP and to the Machias-area Head Start and Child Care. A wide hallway – ideal for tricycles – dissects WCCP’s space, with staff offices on each side.

The children at WCCP have diagnoses that range from “developmental delay,” to autism or a condition along the autism spectrum, to a form of cerebral palsy, to developmentally “at-risk.” These are the more usual. Sometimes we serve children who are deaf, hard of hearing or have visual problems. Over the past 30 years, WCCP has worked with each of these conditions many times over, and from time to time, a child is referred with a rare condition new to the staff.

But back to tricycles. I am on WCCP’s board. I am in and out of the building from time to time; infrequently enough that I notice changes in the children and their abilities. Last spring, two youngsters were making their first acquaintance with this “monster” called Tricycle. An adult staff member, on her knees, helped a child sit on the trike’s seat, place her hands on the handlebars; her feet on the pedals. Then the adult simply pushed the child a short distance down that long, long hall.

She wasn’t yet asking the child to pump the pedals. Maintaining balance on an unknown toy while holding onto its handlebars was complicated enough and presented innumerable challenges.

When introducing such a task to our own children or grandchildren, we have little sense what we are asking of them. From a physical perspective, we want the child to relinquish whatever amount of balance they might have (given their age). They also give up – momentarily – their grand self-confidence as long as they control the balance they have while on their own two feet. But we – loving parents or grandparents – want to take them off the ground altogether; have them rest their weight, and balance themselves, on their bottoms, all the while stretching out their bodies into a new and ungainly “trike-riding” position, holding on desperately to the bars, and making wild searches with their feet for the pedals that are down there. Somewhere.

Tough task. But from a therapeutic perspective, an excellent one. Slowly, slowly, over a year’s time, I watch WCCP’s tricyclers gain skills. A staffer follows behind. When feet slip off the pedals, that adult may replace them, or talk the child through the hard job of moving feet around in space until reconnection is made. The ride down the hall takes up again. If staff members’ doors are open, the child will stop for a minute’s conversation – for the fun and work – of incorporating language and social skills into that child’s therapy program.

Watching this process year after year, I’m more aware of how tight and tense these little bodies are when they begin a new skill. By year’s end, the children are cycling to the end of the hall with ease, making conversation with those they pass. Recently when I was there, two children came cycling down the hall together, each saying, “I won! I won!” Indeed, they both had.

Tricycling is not a lifelong skill these children will need. But it is one of the many, many steps that will help young children with special needs make the progress they need for entrance to school; for entrance to life. Programs like WCCP, and the many others across Maine, make possible these first necessary, early beginnings.

If we fail in the next few weeks to fight off expected cuts in Maine’s 2005 budget – cuts that will eliminate certain services now received by these young children – we will make a grave miscalculation. If these children who are now making such remarkable progress, and those infants and toddlers with special needs who are coming behind them, lose access to the services they need, they will not “make up” for those years at a later time “when funding is better.”

In the next few days important budget decisions will be made by Gov. Balcacci and the Legislature. Last year they worked together to fully restore massive cuts that had been proposed to the BDS Children’s Budget. Maine’s Early Intervention programs were most grateful. But they were told that the same cuts would be made again in the second session. And, yes, the cuts are back again. It is bad policy to cut in the ’05 budget what was restored in the 2004 budget. Full restoration is again the only right thing to do for these children and their families.

Right at the time when the Maine Kids Count data is giving us the alarming data about children’s mental health in Maine, we cannot lessen what we do to prevent those problems. Indeed, we need to do more than we now do at an earlier age. There are certain core values to which a society must keep faith Our obligations to those who are younger and vulnerable is one such value.

Jane Weil lives in Steuben, serves on the board of the Washington County Children’s Program and is on the board of the Maine Association for Infant Mental Health.