Children and youth have the most at stake in many ways, in the process of implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. They are the group that is arguably going to be the most affected by the changes that occur at the regional, national and global levels as a result of the SDGs. They are also the generation that we will count on to create the solutions that will actually move forward the Sustainable Development Goals and the next set of goals in 2030, but only if these children and youth reach their developmental potential. So the stakes are high. There will be no sustainable development in the future without a next generation to support it.
We define Early Childhood Development as the period of development from the prenatal period to age 8 or the beginning of primary schooling in pretty much every country around the world. This covers a huge span from cellular and fetal development to what we think of as a third-grade student, so that’s a massive and really almost unimaginable amount of change.
We will emphasize on two kinds of evidence. First is research on how children develop, and that includes both neuroscience – very exciting advances in that field, as well as the science of how culture and context affect child development. Second we’ll look at another body of research, which is research on program implementation and impacts. What are the actual effects of programs and policies evaluated for their consequences in terms of child and youth and even later adult development; because early childhood experiences do have long-term effects on the life course.
What is unique about early childhood development, and how is it different from later development? How’s it different from adolescent or youth development, from development in adulthood, or ageing? There’s a few factors that make ECD unique. First of all it’s the period in human development when brain development is at its most rapid. It’s also when humans are the most sensitive to environmental influence, so the developing brain is actually exquisitely sensitive to both enriching environments and adverse environments. Because of that, the foundations of lifelong health, learning, and behavior are really laid down in early childhood. It’s a period of development which really only comes once, and if you miss it, there are some fairly long term consequences for life course outcomes: for long-term disease earnings, productivity, and the ability to contribute to a sustainable world.
The period of childhood in humans is also unique relative to those of other species, so our brains are larger relative to our bodies in terms of size than any other species in the world. The human brain also has to undergo a longer period of physical and cognitive immaturity, and therefore the human body is immature for a much longer time relative to its lifespan than most other mammals. What does that mean? That means that the period of complete dependence of young children, infants, toddlers, preschoolers on adults is much longer than other species, so it covers certainly birth to middle childhood, which is really the core age period, but the period of partial dependence is much longer and you can ask your friends – how long it took for you to become completely independent from your parents, and you can think about your friends that way too, but in any case in many cultures of the world the period of adolescence is also viewed as one that is not quite yet adulthood.
The human brain, just to give you a sense of the numbers, has 16 billion neurons compared to 5 billion for an elephant or 9 (billion) for close relatives among the gorilla and ape families. So that’s really a substantially larger brain, many, many more neurons to develop during the early childhood period. So because of this longer period of dependence on adults, any effort to enhance ECD has to support adult capacities and skills in raising children. And this means all adults who come in contact with young children certainly most importantly the parents but also older siblings, aunts, cousins, relatives, and members of the community. Certainly also caregivers, teachers, those whose jobs it may be to help support children. So really we all share responsibility for the care and development of young children, and the African proverb is really true which is that “it takes a village to support a child.” So thank goodness that babies and young children are, in fact, cute. It turns out our brains are wired to think that babies in our own and even some other mammal species are cute. The certain kinds of baby features are things that even young children will respond to, in terms of even younger children and infants.
The Sustainable Development Goals have for the first time placed ECD squarely in the global development agenda, so that is truly exciting. The SDGs therefore acknowledge that human development is intertwined with the future of our planet.
We’ll make connections between child development and sustainable development. For example, we’ll make connections between ECD and issues of poverty and inequality, issues of health and mental health, the field of education and the goals around universal education, policies that are concerned with social protection, current crises related to migration and conflict, and the sustainable development of cities. Those are just a few examples where there are some very close connections between ECD and the other Sustainable Development Goals.
Some central concepts in Early Childhood Development, including how brain architecture is built in the first years, aspects of toxic stress and how toxic stress can derail Early Childhood Development, and resilience or what are the sources in families, communities, and policies that can address sources of stress and adversity to put that off course development back on track.
I’ll talk about three other areas of programs and policies. The first one being social protection or how the most vulnerable in society, the economically disadvantaged, the marginalized, children with disabilities, groups that are discriminated against, how can programs and policies provide supports to these populations? I’ll cover the area of education and particularly pre-primary education but also early childcare and then finally child protection, which is protection of children from abuse, exploitation, and violence.
We can ask, what has the world done to support ECD? The years 2000 to 2015 was the period of the Millennium Development Goals or the MDGs. The MDGs, the last set of global development goals, had no representation of Early Childhood Development except for infant mortality and maternal mortality. And the world did make good progress on these, as we’ll see, but children do have a right to thrive, not just survive. In fact, a classic in the field of Early Childhood Development is a book called “The Twelve Who Survive” by Robert Myers, which was really about this idea that for the 12 of 13 infants who at that point who are surviving past infancy in 1992, that the world needed to pay attention and provide supportive programs and policies. Beyond survival, there’s a lot of evidence supporting the benefits of investing in Early Childhood.
Development beyond infant mortality and maternal mortality, as important as those are.
Ban Ki-Moon, in September of 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals were ratified, had a special session co-sponsored by UNICEF on Early Childhood Development. He recognized the link between ECD and sustainable development by saying that investing in Early Childhood Development does not just benefit children, it benefits societies. He recognized the economic evidence base by citing the fact that returns can be measured in healthier, better educated children, a stronger workforce, and a more prosperous and peaceful future.
Hundreds of millions of children worldwide are being denied their right to achieve their full potential, and we see that adversity and early experiences starts before birth, spans the early years when children are the most vulnerable and dependent on adults, communities, and society. There’s a lot that we all can do to protect children from these adversities, and there’s a large role that the Sustainable Development Goals can play in this process.
Science is telling us about how adversity has disruptive effects on the development of the brain, answering the question of what happens when things are not going well? What happens when children are living in environments that are burdened by deep poverty, exposure to violence, maltreatment, a variety of other factors that we know statistically are associated with poor outcomes. We know that they increase the likelihood for problems in school, problems with behavior, problems with later economic productivity, lifelong problems in physical and mental health.
When children grow up in an environment of constant threat, constant burdens, heavy burdens that influence everyday function, the stress system is activated excessively. It produces what we call toxic stress, and that disrupts the development of brain circuits during their critical periods. It disrupts the cardiovascular system. It disrupts the immune system and creates the foundation for a greater risk for a whole host of physical and mental health problems and difficulties and learning. It all comes down to a very simple message, which is early experiences literally shape our biology, create either a strong or a weak foundation for all the health, learning, and behavior that follow for a lifetime.
Parents who are responsive, warm, sensitive, that is not only associated with cognitive and language development, but also with secure attachment. The expression of warmth could differ across cultures, but parents who smile a lot and demonstrate positive affect towards their babies, this leads to positive social developmental outcomes. And negative experiences, such as exposure to family violence, chronic and harsh parenting, maltreatment, this threatens secure attachment and has consequences for later social development.
Typically our health sector would look at child survival, they would look at immunization rates but they wouldn’t look at development and sort of it’s holistic sense of cognitive, language, social-emotional development.
Shabir Ahmad is a regular contributor to GK
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The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.