Keating – developmental health

So the first question is what does developmental health mean and why do we need to understand the concept of developmental health? Well, basically developmental health is a concept and a term that we arrived at by looking first of all at a whole lot of different evidence. The basic evidence is that if one looks at the kinds of pathways by which individuals get to various kinds of outcomes that we think are important outcomes we see a lot of similarity in the pathways that they arrive at so for example, the pathways by which individuals get to higher levels of physical health, higher levels of mental health, as in the absence of emotional behavior problems, higher levels of achievement or competence in terms of literacy and mathematics and coping skills.  

What we find is that there is a lot of similarity both at the individual levels of experience as well as in terms of how populations function. So in a sense, rather than somewhat more longer list of talking about that these kinds of characteristics and kinds of experiences are important for health and mental health and emotional and behavior, avoiding emotional and behavior problems and coping skills and competence and achievement which is rather a long list. it seems as thought there’s a lot of reason not just for convenience but in terms of the evidence to put them together. In a notion of developmental health which essentially says that the circumstances in which we create in early childhood particularly beyond which we lay the groundwork for these things to function in a healthy and positive ways.  

It also means that we should understand that one of the reasons to understand it is that we can have common concern that is if we are concerned about trying to promote health or trying to promote mathematics, which we often don’t think of as in the same kind of category but in the early years if we want to promote both of those things a lot of the things that we would think about in terms of creating environments and creating contexts and creating circumstances and experiences for kids are going to be very similar kinds of things. So basically at one level it’s driven by evidence and to talk about the convenience of a developmental health category because a lot of the pathways do overlap in important ways but then also from the point of view of what do we do about that, it helps us to understand and to realize that the things that will —- that in later life and create a foundation for that in later life are very similar kinds of things and that –early years across different outcomes that we care about.