Mindset Shift

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 and families experiencing the hardships of poverty, racism, and other structural inequities. The size of those effects, however, has been inconsistent, and increasing impact at scale remains elusive. Solving the economic and workforce challenges facing child care and early 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 goal—we must see them as the starting point in a long-term quest for greater impacts.

All of the opportunities and threats surrounding young children and their families shape health and development—and many are deeply embedded in the places where they live. Since 2020, a combination of pandemic-related setbacks linked to economic insecurity broadly, and a long-overdue reckoning with racial inequities more specifically, 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 well-being 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 is compelling. The price of inaction is too high.

A remarkable convergence of advances both within and outside the traditional boundaries of the early childhood field is producing a promising 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 community revitalization efforts designed to build up community-level assets and opportunities and break down structural barriers. 
• Growing understanding by community revitalization organizations of the impact of their efforts on child and family well-being, beginning before birth, and the key role that healthy child development can play in interrupting intergenerational poverty.
• 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 document (and learn from) resilience in the face of hardships and threats.

Our plan is to build connections and facilitate shared learning among community revitalization organizations, early childhood programs, scientific knowledge from multiple disciplines, and the wide range of lived experiences of families with young children. Together, we can build evidence of success and disseminate lessons learned from efforts that don’t work.  We will aim high but start small with a few carefully selected groups of motivated partners. Our vision is to achieve substantially larger impacts for more children through a balanced portfolio of investments in both community-focused initiatives and relationship-based services. Our intention is to communicate widely both successes and failures, and focus attention on lessons learned from both.

Capitalizing on this convergence of knowledge, infrastructure, and experience to catalyze significant improvements in outcomes for young children requires all of us to cross boundaries in more effective ways. Direct services for children and families continue to fall into separate policy sectors—education, health, child welfare, 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 economic development, urban planning, zoning, 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.

Driven by ECD 2.0, in partnership with community revitalization organizations and change-makers across sectors, we can expand the policy mindset from separate silos to a multi-pronged, coordinated approach that fully supports both individual development and community well-being. We can increase the impact of our investments in young children now and shift the life trajectories of millions over time. 

Our dreams for CSC are tempered by humbleness—given the complexity of the challenges and the supportive but limited nature of our own role. But we are also driven by a sense of urgency, given the high costs of settling for less. We welcome fellow travelers on this road to a broad mindset shift that expands the boundaries of programs and policies to support healthy pregnancies and the well-being of young children and the adults who care for them. Please join us on this learning journey and help us spread the idea that so much more is possible if we work better together.