Harvard University Report Examines Relationship Between Place, Race, and Early Childhood Development

Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child has released a new resource that examines the relationship between place, race, and early childhood development.

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The report, released in late June, noted that over the past 20 years the American public’s understanding of early childhood development has evolved and that, today, people have a general understanding of the negative impacts of significant adversity. As a result, they tend to appreciate the power of supportive relationships in building and protecting the developing brain.

But, the report notes, there is still work to do when it comes to the impacts of our broader environments on children’s development, especially considering that these environments are shaped by racism.

According to the Center on the Developing Child’s research, the American public does not readily connect the concepts of place, race, and early childhood development. The center identified a strategy for talking about the connections between these three things and provided a set of recommendations for advancing the strategy in early childhood educational settings.

The report includes:

• The main ideas that the new framing strategy is designed to communicate - for example, racism affects how we design place and creates unequal impacts on children

• The primary ways of thinking Americans rely upon when thinking about child development, place, and racism - for example, the idea that families alone influence children’s development

• Four types of frames that can be used to advance greater understanding of the connection between place, racism, and development - values, narratives, explanatory examples, and metonyms

More information on the Center on the Developing Child’s research can be found in an accompanying toolkit.