Hertzman - relational community

Another things that’s important in many developing countries is the degree to which what we’ve been calling the relational community, that is to say the community that you get your identify from, really, really matters. We all have communities that we live in which we would can geographic: our neighbourhoods, and so forth. But we also have those communities from which we get our identity. So, in Canada Aboriginal people by and large regardless of where they live take an Aboriginal identity with them. So, it’s a non-geographic community but it carries with it a whole lot of things that are incredibly important for early child development.

For one, it carries with it a sense of what your collective possibilities are. But it also carries with it norms in terms of parenting style and it carries with it norms in terms of gender equity. And, around the world we really understand that this question of gender equity is a principle driver of early child development and also the determinants of health more broadly.

So, if you go to those developing countries that are doing very well in terms of human development and you can look at Cuba you can look at the Kerala province in India, and a variety of other places, almost to a rule, those are places where the education and independence of women has been deeply embedded. Right, and so the relational communities in our world are very, very important in terms of, in terms of whether or not we have potential for gender equity, whether or not the family systems are authoritarian or promote expression and so forth . And those things all influence the way early child development goes.