IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Robin Gibson Tel. 860-437-8010

FAMOUS AMOS SAYS,
"A PARENT IS A CHILD'S FIRST TEACHER

Quaker Hill, CT….Wally "Famous" Amos told 200 people gathered at the Children's Rights Council's 20th Anniversary Conference in Washington, DC November 4, 2006 that "a parent is a child's first teacher."

Mark Roseman of Quaker Hill was the Conference Coordinator and serves as the Assistant Director for Child Access for the national Children's Rights Council. He is also Executive Director of the Children's Rights Council of Connecticut which he founded in 1999.

Roseman, a divorced dad and formerly a Hamden resident for 20 years, provides information, education and support to single, separated, divorced and never-married parents on issues of child custody and child access or visitation. The CRC of CT provides supervised visitation services weekly in their Norwich facility. In private discussion with Amos, Roseman says that a partnership with Amos's "Reading Aloud" program based in Savanah, Georgia will be a great asset in helping reunite parents with respect and joy. Roseman sees the benefits of the reading interaction as a potentially more rapid means of restoring and strengthening the bonds between children and their non-custodial parents and extended family members.

Says Roseman, "chocolate chip cookies never tasted so good since I met Wally Amos. He has provided important insight into child rearing. Said Amos, "If you read to a child ten minutes a day, a child's life will be changed forever. We can create wonderful parents, vital families…by reading aloud."

Roseman credits his former wife with teaching their then pre-school age children to read phonetically, a method which has become formally accepted by many school systems in only the last several years.

"Access to children is not only a right of parents, but a right which needs to be enforced by family court and federal law. Marianne Malky lost a son to child abduction and pioneered child abduction legislation leading to the international Hague Convention, requiring return of the child so stolen. Yet, in spite of this, enforcement remains a major problem. CRC supports a child's rights to extend beyond their home state and home country."

Further information is available online at www.crckids.org , in Washington at 1-800-787-KIDS or locally at 860-437-8010.