Hertzman – key factors

As I said, the importance of the early years is that it influences the rest of the life and so by the second decade of life, we see that children who have not had a good start are at an increased risk of school failure, of becoming pregnant early on in life, and of getting involved with problems with the law and criminal justice. By the third and the fourth decade of life, they are at more risk for obesity, for elevated blood pressure, and for depression which is a huge problem throughout the world. By the fifth and sixth decades of life, they are at increased risk for heart disease and for diabetes and then late in life they are at increased risk for premature aging and memory loss. We know this because children have been followed from birth right across the life course, so this is not rhetoric, this is about real measurement of how the early years influences health and well-being as well as learning and behavior across the entire life course. 

So then, that raises a very important question. What actually are the key factors that influence early child development? Now many of us get caught up in empty discussions about this. Sort of is it family or is it society? And the key word there is “or” that somehow or another it’s gotta be one or the other.  

This little graphic with the ducks shows you what’s the problem with that kind of thinking. Here we have a mother duck with her babies following her along, doing what a mother duck is supposed to do. But in this second panel here, you notice that she encounters a social condition that is beyond her control and she has to navigate her babies through that social condition. And what happens? Well you can see at the end, only one survives. So, is it family or is it society. Is she to blame or is society to blame? And clearly the answer here is, that we have to have a partnership between family and society, exactly the way we have committed ourselves to in the convention of the rights of the child. So that families want to do the best for their children but they need support from society at all levels and I’d like to talk more about that.  

Because the answer to the question is really this. That early child development depends upon the experiences that children have. Like we’ve talked about before, the human faces up close, the language, the opportunities to develop socially and emotionally and that those experiences occur in the environments where they live, learn and grow up.