Children thrive when their families thrive. And children struggle when their families struggle. This is especially true during the earliest years of life when child development is deeply influenced by a child’s environment and experiences.
As families grapple with the affordability of necessities like food, housing, child care, and ongoing changes to the social safety net, job market, immigration, health care, and civic life, the impacts on children can be wide-ranging. For example, access to nutritious food shapes health while a parent or caregiver’s mental health and levels of stress influence children’s behaviors, language development, and brain development.
Next week is the Week of the Young Child, an annual event by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a professional organization for people working in early childhood. The NAEYC “works to promote high-quality early learning for all young children, birth through age 8, by connecting early childhood practice, policy, and research,” according to its website. To promote the Week of the Young Child, we are putting the focus on whole child and whole family support because, in the crucial early years, supporting healthy child development and learning means supporting the family as well as the child.
In our brief, Strengthening Whole Family Comprehensive Supports in Early Childhood, which was authored by Joan Wasser Gish at the Boston College Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, Rachel Chazan-Cohen at the University of Connecticut Applied Research on Children Lab, and Tassy Warren at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, we note that:
“Research demonstrates that: caring relationships, access to basic resources, access to opportunities, and safe and predictable early environments can buffer children and their families against the adverse consequences of toxic stress and boost healthy development and learning. One effective way to promote healthy child development and learning is by integrating early childhood education and comprehensive family supports. Building upon relationships established within early education and care programs, children and families enrolled can be connected to social, emotional, health and academic supports—such as diapers, food, books, parenting support, special education, and health services—as well as developmental opportunities for children like playgroups, music, art; family visits to libraries and museums; and connections to opportunities for parental and caregiver leadership and support such as education, job training, employment, transportation, housing, financial supports, community groups, mental health and health services.”
Helping families to build a “village” of support allows families to create more safe, stable, nurturing environments at home and in the community. This in turn, helps these families’ infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to experience a sense of safety and stability that supports healthy child development and learning.
In approximately half of City Connects schools, Coordinators help young children and their families get connected to resources and opportunities. City Connects Coordinator Elizabeth Planje explains in this blog post that working with young children in preschool programs to provide services and promote healing requires a different lens.
“You do have to be a little more curious to find the root cause of what’s bothering very young children,” Planje, the coordinator at Sacred Heart School, in Lynn, Mass., as well as a therapist, said. At Sacred Heart, she worked with students as young as 2.9 years old. “The older kids can tell you more about what’s going on, but with younger kids you have to be more of a detective.”
Salem, Massachusetts created a partnership between its public school district and five community-based preschools aimed at improving the preschool experience and better supporting the needs of young families. Early Childhood City Connects Coordinators Linda Guevara and Christy Uhrowczik have connected families with community resources that offer food and housing support, parent education and support groups, and mental health support.
“The connections we’ve been able to make with some parents—connecting them with a resource or just touching base with them—have been a win,” said Guevara.
By connecting young children and their families to resources and opportunities, Coordinators help families, and their early learning programs, to build a “village” of care and support around each child. As noted in the brief, “whole child, whole family” supports:
- promote access to resources, opportunities, and positive relationships,
- reduce stressors within the child’s environment and strengthen families,
- support development across all domains, and
- narrow inequities tied to race and class.
The early years are an especially sensitive developmental period, with more than one million neural connections formed every second during the first few years of life. Experiences in the early years lay the foundation for later years. Whole child, whole family support can reduce family stressors and promote healthy child development, learning and thriving. To learn more, read our brief here.
