Everywhere in the world we do see socioeconomic gradients in children\u2019s development. But everywhere in the world we also see trend buckers. We see resilient children and resilient families. That is to say families that are able to create an intimate environment around the child which transcends socioeconomic circumstances, that is stimulating and nutrient in ways that allow kids to be able to take advantage of all sorts of opportunities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you think about it, what do kids need? Well obviously they need food, they need hygiene, they need a rich and responsive language environment, they need protection from disapproval, teasing and punishment, they need opportunities for self-expression. But any one of those can be disconnect from the social circumstances of the family as long as there\u2019s in effect food and hygiene. So that the vast majority of the places now there is access to basic food and hygiene. So even in sub Saharan Africa for instance surveys of parents have shown that over 80% of parents feel that they can provide those rock basics for their kids and what they want is \u2018education\u2019, which means the opportunity for their kids to develop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So within families then and within supportive communities, if you can get around the child a group of adults and older children who understand about how human development works then the possibility of creating environments which are optimum for development is large. And in fact if you have environments where there is multi generations, where this is arrange of different adults close to the child and all the rest of it, you can actually get environments that would work better than nuclear family environments. I mean the problem that we\u2019ve got in our society is that we\u2019ve moved in the direction of the nuclear family, we\u2019ve moved from the direction of full participation in the economy. And the premise of the nuclear family is that the parents that you have been dealt are the best nurturers for you, right. And that may be true but it may not be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you could imagine a more traditional village environment where there are a range of adults around, it may be that the adults that you resonate best with are not your immediate family and that was more traditional. However what\u2019s happening now globally is because of the way the global economy is working there is no society in the world where children, where more than 25% of children have daily access to extended family. Well that\u2019s starting to break down. And yet going back to my favorite slum in Nairobi, when they finally moved to universal access to education they actually found that the highest functioning primary school in the country was in one of these slum areas. And this was an area where the family dynamics and the community dynamics were positive enough to transcend the fact that there wasn\u2019t much money around for instance. So we know it can happen. And it may in fact be easier in societies where the mechanisms of social distance that have emerged in Western society are not as deeply embedded yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everywhere in the world we do see socioeconomic gradients in children\u2019s development. But everywhere in the world we also see trend buckers. We see resilient children and resilient families. That is to say families that are able to create an intimate environment around the child which transcends socioeconomic circumstances, that is stimulating and nutrient in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2382","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2382\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}