Total Environment Assessment Model for Early Child Development

Total Environment Assessment Model
for Early Child Development
Introduction and Overview
What children experience during the early
years sets a critical foundation for their entire
life course. This is because experiences shape
early child development—including health/
physical, social/emotional, and language/
cognitive domains—which in turn strongly
influences basic learning, school success,
economic participation, social citizenry, and
health throughout life. Assuring all children
have quality experiences in early childhood is
overwhelmingly contingent on the actions of
family, community, and society in providing
them with ‘nurturant’ environments in which
to live and to thrive.
Purpose of the Present Study
The present study is borne out of the
imperative to find an equity-based approach
for fostering successful early child development
in societies throughout the world. A
tremendous body of literature suggests that
early child development [ecd]—physical,
social/emotional, and language/cognitive
- is a fundamental determinant of well-being
throughout the life course.
The building blocks of ecd are rooted in
the interaction between children’s biological
factors and the environmental conditions
which they experience during their earliest
years; differences among children in successful
ecd largely arise from differences in the
extent to which their environments display
‘nurturant’ qualities. This study thus seeks to
explore the most ‘nurturant’ environmental
conditions for children, and ways in which
nurturant conditions can be provided to all
children in an equitable manner.
In particular, the scope of this volume is
fourfold: 1) to demonstrate which environments
matter most for children. This includes
environments from the most intimate
(family) to the most remote (global), 2) to
review which environmental configurations
are optimal for ecd, including aspects of
environments that are economic, social,
and physical in nature, 3) to identify the
‘contingency relationships’ that link broader
socioeconomic environments of society to
the quality of nurturing present within the
intimate environments in which children are
embedded, such as families and communities.
4) To highlight opportunities to foster
nurturant conditions for children at multiple
levels of society (from family-level action to
national and global environmental action) and
by multiple means (i.e. through programmatic
implementation, to “child-centered” social
and economic policy development).
Nurturant Conditions for ecd and
Child Survival in Resource-Poor
Nations: Indivisible Phenomena,
Indivisible Goals
Though ecd is often framed as a ‘luxury’
on which resource-rich nations can afford
to focus, ecd is important in all countries,
resource-rich and resource-poor alike. Put
bluntly, our planet provides no examples of
highly successful societies among those who
have ignored development in the early years.
Without question, infant and child mortality
rates in resource-poor nations are alarmingly
and unacceptably high. However, they must
not overshadow the equal (or greater) proportion
of children who remain alive in these
nations - the destitute environments in which
children are dying are also those in which they
are surviving. As such, the quality of environmental
conditions in resource-poor nations is
an urgent matter for improving child survival,
as well as bettering children’s life chances, and
those of their societies.
In these countries, children are likely to
suffer from poor nutrition and poor health. A
child here has a four in ten chance of living in
extreme poverty and 10.5 million children a
year die before age 5. [2].They are also at high
risk of never attending school [2]. The recent
Lancet series on ecd estimates that there are
559 million children under 5 in developing
countries—including 155 million who are
stunted and 62 million who are not stunted
but are living in poverty—for a total of over
Introduction
and Overview
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