How Being Your Sister’s Keeper Is in Your Self-Interest

Source: Maureen Barlin/flickr

We are all staying home now to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 virus, reduce the severity of the load on the health care system, and therefore keep our society functional. By keeping the system functional, each of us is also keeping ourselves safe, both short-term and long-term.

The same principle—helping ourselves by helping our communities—applies to early child development. When we work together to increase the chances for each child to become a happily productive citizen of a rapidly changing world, it benefits not only the individual children whose lives are touched, but also each one of the rest of us, and therefore Planet Earth.

In the late 1990s, Daniel Keating and Clyde Hertzman of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research brought together a group of eminent researchers across diverse fields to consider the impact of individual and community health on society as a whole. This led to the Millennium Dialogue for Early Child Development in 2001, co-sponsored by the Invest in Kids Foundation and the University of Toronto. The scientists who participated in the Dialogue were pediatrician Ronald Barr, pediatrician/epidemiologist Thomas Boyce, child psychologist Megan Gunnar, epidemiologist Clyde Hertzman, developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, clinical child psychologist Alicia Lieberman, neuroscientist Charles Nelson, developmental psychiatrist Michael Rutter, and child psychologist Richard Tremblay. This cross-disciplinary dialogue of internationally renowned experts resulted in a book edited by Dan Keating, Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development, where each of the experts who participated in the Dialogue describes their findings and share their recommendations for moving forward into a world where every child has a chance to grow up strong, healthy, and happily productive.

A starting point for discussion among the scientists who participated in the Dialogue was the ground-breaking research done by Fraser Mustard, Dan Keating, and colleagues, showing the importance of the social gradient: the greater the wealth gap in a given country, the poorer the outcomes for all citizens. The slope of the social gradient makes a difference across a wide range of outcomes, including education, health, longevity, happiness, and resilience. Regardless of the overall level of wealth, countries like the United States and the United Kingdom that have large income gaps have lower levels of well-being across all indicators, as compared with countries like Norway or Belgium, where social and income differences are less pronounced.

Another point of agreement across the participating scientists was that although modern societies have an enormous capacity for generating wealth, children and youth are increasingly showing signs of alienation, anxiety, and other stress-related disorders. Families with young children are the most vulnerable, and economically poor families are at the highest risk, but the anxiety is so widespread that it’s having a serious impact even on those who are economically secure.

In “Toward a Learning Society Network: How Being One’s Brother’s Keeper Is in Everyone’s Self-Interest,” Anita Zijdemans and I described some of the implications of the findings discussed at the Millennium Dialogue:

1. Make sure all kids are mathematically literate. When Robbie Case and his colleagues applied the gradient analysis to mathematics achievement, they found that the steeper the socioeconomic gradient, the lower the average mathematical achievement. They also found that early childhood interventions can remove the impact of the gradient effect on those who are most disadvantaged by it.

Their most exciting findings for our purposes concerned the surprisingly effective successes achieved by targeted interventions: By ensuring that preschool and kindergarten students have the numeracy skills they need, not only did individual children benefit through greater success across their schooling, leading to many educational and career benefits, but also population numeracy skills were enhanced, and the community’s store of intellectual capital increased, bringing with it a higher competitive advantage in a global economy.

2. To reduce delinquency and criminality long-term, provide early support for high-risk families now. Richard Tremblay and colleagues found that family income, maternal education, single parenthood, and neighborhood are all major influences on children’s cognitive development and aggression and that the roots of delinquency and criminality are in early childhood. They also found that not only can socioeconomic gradients be buffered by family factors, but also that these factors are powerfully susceptible to intervention. When communities support their high-risk families in acquiring and practicing healthy child development habits, children are far less likely to be alienated, aggressive, and violent, which has obvious benefits for society as a whole as well as for the individuals and families in question.

3. When parents are supported in acquiring parenting skills, their children are more likely to thrive. Many of the Dialogue experts shared their conclusions that, in order to develop optimally, infants and young children need to receive certain kinds of stimulation at certain critical periods. When parents are given the support necessary for learning how everything—literacy, numeracy, physical strength, well-being, self-regulation skills, etc.—develops, their children’s future options change dramatically.

4. Schools should reflect the fact that intelligence is a social process. Schools can be transformed into learning organizations that reflect the social embeddedness of learning. By changing learning environments to capitalize on the collaborative process of knowledge-building, we can give children the tools they’ll need for full participation in the knowledge-based economies of the information age.

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One of the obvious implications of the research that culminated in the Millennium Dialogue for Early Child Development is the need to invest in the lives of struggling children and families, and to ensure that every parent and every child has what they need to thrive.

Just as it is in everyone’s self-interest to self-isolate in order to flatten the COVID-19 curve, it is in everyone’s self-interest to work toward putting the supports in place to give every child a chance for health, happiness, and learning. Once this virus is under control, perhaps we’ll find the collective consciousness to do what it takes to take care of our youngest sisters and brothers.