From Neurons to Neighborhoods The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 384-417
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From page 384... ...
growing numbers of young children spending considerable time in child care settings of highly variable quality, starting in infancy; and (5) continuing high levels of serious family problems and adverse community conditions that are detrimental for children.
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From page 385... ...
The first is rooted in contemporary concerns about promoting human capital development in a highly competitive and rapidly changing world. It asks: How can society use knowledge about early child development to maximize the nation's human capital and ensure the ongoing vitality of its democratic institutions?
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From page 386... ...
The developmental tasks of this period range from the mastery of essential building blocks for learning and the motivation to succeed in school, to the ability to get along with other children, to make friends, and become engaged in a social group, as well as the capacity to manage powerful emotions. Although the study of child development has traditionally sorted such accomplishments into discrete functional categories (e.g., cognitive, linguistic, social)
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From page 387... ...
In this context, although there has been a proliferation of prekindergarten and early intervention initiatives designed to promote school readiness, access to these programs is highly uneven across the early childhood population in the United States. · Early child development can be seriously compromised by social, regulatory, and emotional impairments.
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From page 388... ...
Early Environments Matter and Nurturing Relationships Are Essential The scientific evidence ranging from behavioral genetics and neuroscience to policy analysis and intervention research on the significant developmental impacts of early experiences, caregiving relationships, and environmental threats is incontrovertible. Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain's evolving circuitry to the child's capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning early in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years.
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From page 389... ...
If provided or restored, however, a sensitive caregiving relationship can foster remarkable recovery. Young children establish and can benefit greatly from a variety of close relationships.
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From page 390... ...
Moreover, significant dysfunctions frequently cluster together i.e., maternal depression and substance abuse often go hand in hand; family and community violence may often affect the same child. These youngsters and their parents are among the most vulnerable members of society, and they require a level of professional expertise that is neither routinely considered in the staffing of conventional early childhood programs nor necessarily available in many high-risk neighborhoods.
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From page 391... ...
Strategies that are used to recruit and retain talented elementary schoolteachers are no less important for children before they enter school. There is, in particular, an urgent need to upgrade the qualifications and compensation of child care providers.
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From page 392... ...
What remains to be understood with greater precision are the threshold levels below which adverse environmental effects do not occur, how and why multiple insults operate together to produce additive and sometimes multiplicative effects and, at the other end of the spectrum, how attempts to enhance children's development affect the developing brain. These questions will be best addressed through sustained scientific collaboration between child development researchers and neuro.
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From page 393... ...
Society Is Changing and the Needs of Young Children Are Not Being Addressed Developmental science points toward the importance of protecting the multiple environments in which young children live and acknowledging the complexity and significance of the work involved in rearing children both at home and in child care settings. Yet profound social and economic transformations are making it exceedingly difficult for parents to strike a healthy balance between spending time with their children, securing their economic needs, and protecting them from the many risks beyond the home that may have an adverse impact on their health and development.
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From page 394... ...
Notwithstanding substantial increases in federal and state funding for child care in recent years, public expenditures have done little to restructure the inadequate system that existed a decade ago, when the National Research Council last conducted a major review of child care research and called for sweeping policy actions to improve the quality of care in the United States (National Research Council, 1990~. Over the intervening years, additional
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From page 395... ...
Although some states and localities have taken exemplary steps to upgrade child care quality, significant efforts remain sporadic and uncoordinated. · Young children are the poorest members of society and are more likely to be poor today than they were 25 years ago.
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From page 396... ...
They all share a belief that early childhood development is susceptible to environmental influences and that wise public investments in young children can increase the odds of favorable developmental outcomes. The scientific evidence resoundingly supports these premises.
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From page 397... ...
These include, for example, inferences about the effects of early experience on brain development and behavior, the effects of early behavior on later adolescent and adult functioning, and the impacts of specific interventions (such as enhanced child care and early education, home visiting programs, etc.) on child health and development.
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From page 398... ...
· The elements of early intervention programs that enhance social and
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From page 399... ...
To the extent that the early childhood intervention community seeks to draw on emerging research on brain development to support its efforts, it is important to recognize that selected aspects of regulatory behaviors and social interaction have become an important focus in the neurosciences. · The reconciliation of traditional early intervention programs, formats, and strategies many of which emphasize the importance of active parent involvement and the delivery of services in the home setting with the economic and social realities of contemporary family life is a pressing concern.
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From page 400... ...
First, many of the well-documented risk factors that can impair early brain development are embedded in the experiences of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, violence, toxic exposures, and substance abuse and other risk-taking behaviors. These threats to child health and development call for a strengthened prevention agenda that extends beyond the capacity of individually oriented medical care and requires a more vigorous and creative public health approach.
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From page 401... ...
For many families, including both immigrant and native-born families with widely varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds, involvement in an early intervention program can be a complex challenge. The potential complications may include different perceptions of: (1)
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From page 402... ...
Second, establish explicit and effective linkages among agencies that currently are charged with implementing the work requirements of welfare reform and those that oversee the provision of both early intervention programs and child and adult mental health services. Recommendation 11 A comprehensive analysis of the professional development challenges facing the early childhood field should be considered as a collaborative effort involving professional organizations and representatives from the wide array of training institutions that prepare indi
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From page 403... ...
First, it is clear that the capacity to increase the odds of favorable birth outcomes and positive adaptation in the early childhood years would be strengthened considerably by the new knowledge that would be generated by enhanced collaboration among child development researchers, neuroscientists, and molecular geneticists. A creative combination of biological and psychosocial research efforts would increase the ability to unlock some of the enduring mysteries about how biogenetic and environmental factors interact in a reciprocal fashion to influence developmental pathways.
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From page 404... ...
Further research in this area will advance both the development of effective interventions for improving the lives of children with impairments and a greater understanding of behavioral development in young children who are relatively free of problems. Research that extends evidence from animal models to expand understanding of how detrimental early experiences affect the regulation of the fear-stress system in human infants and young children will be particularly important.
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From page 405... ...
Furthermore, while substantial progress has been made in preventing infant deaths associated with low birthweight and prematurity, society is still relatively unprepared to address the learning and behavioral problems that many of these infants exhibit as they grow up. Integrating the Basic Science of Human Development and the Applied Science of Early Childhood Intervention In an effort to promote greater cross-fertilization between those who study the underlying science of early development and those who evaluate the efficacy of interventions, the committee recommends that high priority be assigned to the following lines of inquiry: · Research on early pathways toward psychopathology, which brings together those who study social-emotional development from a variety of disciplines (e.g., infant mental health, developmental psychology, social work, genetics, neuroscience, pediatrics, and psychiatry)
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From page 406... ...
To this end, the development of interventions geared to preschool classrooms offers a particularly promising avenue for advancing the early detection and prevention of problems that become apparent when children first encounter peer groups, with their associated demands for compliance with group norms. · Research that integrates investigations focused on how early biological insults, (e.g., iron deficiency anemia, lead ingestion)
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From page 407... ...
Although there is firm, experimental evidence that high-quality, comprehensive, center-based early intervention programs can shift the odds in favor of more positive short- and long-term developmental outcomes for young children, and thereby produce a handsome social return on their investments, we lack comparable causal evidence on the developmental consequences of more typical child care arrangements, only some of which are center-based. Given the unlikely possibility that sufficient investments will ever be made to ensure access for all low-income children to programs that approach the magnitude and scope of the High/Scope Perry Preschool or Abecedarian projects, for example, policy makers need credible information about the potential impacts of lesser investments in program quality.
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From page 408... ...
Studies that integrate qualitative and quantitative methods are especially well suited to address the fundamental questions in this area. 1 ~7 · Efforts to undertake the laborious, but vitally needed, task of improving the available tools for measuring important but generally neglected early developmental outcomes (i.e., before school entry)
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From page 409... ...
Finally, the compelling need and considerable costs of such an undertaking underscore the importance of public-sector leadership. Improving Evaluations of Early Childhood Interventions In an effort to improve the nation's capacity to learn more from evaluations of early childhood interventions, the committee recommends that: .
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From page 410... ...
There is an urgent need for more rigorous synthesis of streams of related intervention research across the multiple domains of early childhood services in order to investigate causal questions and assess the generalizability of findings. Consensus conferences convened by the National Institutes of Health provide a highly regarded mechanism for evaluating available scientific information and assessing its practical implications.
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From page 411... ...
Reasonable but untested hypotheses (e.g., repeated exposure to violence alters neural circuits in the developing brain that control an infant's reaction to threat) make up a large proportion of the knowledge base that guides responsible policy, service delivery, and parenting practices at any point in time, but they may be confirmed or disproved by subsequent investigation.
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From page 412... ...
Notwithstanding the inevitable bumps in the road, the course of human development, like that of all living organisms, moves naturally in the direction of positive adaptation. · The developing brain is dependent on the inputs of a variety of early sensory, perceptual, and motor experiences (e.g., sound, binocular vision, movement through space)
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From page 413... ...
for both children living in high-risk environments and children with biologically based disabilities. However, not all interventions are effective, when they do work they are rarely panaceas, and (unlike immunizations followed by an occasional booster)
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From page 414... ...
Businesses have the opportunity to support family well-being through creating positive work environments, offering flexible work schedules, and providing important financial benefits, such as family health insurance and child care. Local, state, and federal governments have substantial opportunities to influence the quality of family life and the availability of resources to support child needs through such diverse mechanisms as tax policies to alleviate economic hardship (e.g., earned income and child care tax credits)
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From page 415... ...
The charge to this committee was to blend the knowledge and insights of a broad range of disciplines to generate an integrated science of early childhood development. The charge to society is to blend the skepticism of a scientist, the passion of an advocate, the pragmatism of a policy maker, the creativity of a practitioner, and the devotion of a parent and to use existing knowledge to ensure both a decent quality of life for all of our children and a promising future for the nation.
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From page 417... ...
Pp. 229-272 in Threats to Optimal Development: Integrating Biological, Psychological, and Social Risk Factors: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, Volume 27.
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