Call to Action
A Call to Action
Our call to action is simple to say but challenging to do: Reach out across the silos that limit the power of what each of us can accomplish alone. Build bridges to other fields, other domains, and potential partners whose effectiveness can multiply the power of current early childhood investments. Take a step back from our daily challenges and ask: “Where are the sources of stress and adversity in families’ lives, where are the barriers to their well-being, and what are we doing collectively to reduce (and eventually eliminate) them?”
For more than half a century, early childhood policy in the United States has focused primarily on center-based programs for children facing adversity as well as home-visiting services and financial support for families with limited income. Extensive research on these investments has documented positive effects on the lives of many young children experiencing the hardships of poverty, racism, and other structural inequities, but the size of those effects has been inconsistent and increasing impact at scale remains elusive. Solving the economic and workforce challenges of early care and education is a critical piece of the puzzle. Ensuring that all programs meet high standards of quality and are widely accessible is foundational to moving forward. Yet we must not settle for current best practices as the end goal—we must see them as the starting point in a never-ending quest for greater impacts.
All of the opportunities and threats surrounding young children and their families shape child health and development—and many are deeply embedded in the places where they live. Since 2020, a combination of pandemic-related closures and a long-overdue reckoning with racial inequities has laid bare deep inequalities in access to opportunities and exposure to threats in the United States and around the world. Many systems that are intended to support children’s development and address inequities remain fragile—and the early childhood field is at an inflection point. The need for new ideas to produce larger impacts and reduce preventable disparities in health and development is compelling.
The Opportunity
A remarkable convergence of advances both within and outside the traditional boundaries of the early childhood field is producing a powerful opportunity to multiply the positive impacts we can have on the current well-being and future life prospects of today’s youngest children. These developments include:
- Extensive knowledge and powerful yet relatively untapped insights from the lived experiences of service providers, community leaders, policymakers, and families raising young children in a diversity of contexts.
- Dramatic growth in the development of place-based initiatives designed to build up community-level assets and opportunities and break down structural barriers.
- Deeper scientific understanding of how a wide range of experiences and exposures affect the early development of multiple biological systems in the body, with lifelong effects on learning, educational achievement, economic and social mobility, and both physical and mental health.
- Enhanced capacity to measure stress activation in young children in order to better assess, monitor, prevent, and mitigate the disruptive effects of excessive adversity early in life, as well as build resilience in the face of hardships and threats.
Capitalizing on this convergence of knowledge, infrastructure, and experience to catalyze significant improvements in outcomes for young children requires us to cross boundaries in many ways. Direct services for children and families often fall into separate policy silos—education, health, and social services to name a few—yet the publication of a report from the National Academy of Sciences 25 years ago (From Neurons to Neighborhoods) demonstrated that early childhood policies and programs within and across these domains are all informed by a common science base. Similarly, policy domains such as zoning, urban planning, economic development, and environmental regulation all have significant influences on the conditions that affect the building blocks of healthy development—yet their potential impacts are not addressed as a coordinated package for early childhood investment.
The Work
Our plan is to build connections and facilitate shared learning among place-based initiatives, early childhood programs, scientific knowledge from multiple disciplines, and the lived experiences of families with young children in a wide diversity of conditions. Our strategy is to aim high but start small with a few carefully selected groups of motivated partners. Our objective is to build evidence of success and compile lessons learned from efforts that don’t work. Our vision is to achieve substantially larger impacts for more children through a balanced portfolio of investments in both community-focused initiatives and direct services. Our aim is to leverage the best of these complementary assets, beginning prenatally and continuing through the first 2-3 years after birth. Our dreams are tempered by humbleness—given the complexity of the challenges and the supportive nature of our own role—but driven by a sense of urgency, given the high costs of settling for less.