An estimated 12 million girls aged 15–19 years, and 777,000 girls younger than 15 give birth globally each year. Contexts of war and displacement increase the likelihood of early marriage and childbearing. Given the developmentally sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence, adolescent motherhood in conflict-affected contexts may put a family at risk intergenerationally. We propose that the specifics of normative neuroendocrine development during adolescence, including increased sensitivity to stress, pose additional risks to adolescent girls and their young children in the face of war and displacement, with potential lifelong consequences for health and development. This paper proposes a developmental, dual-generational framework for research and policies to better understand and address the needs of adolescent mothers and their small children. We draw from the literature on developmental stress physiology, adolescent parenthood in contexts of war and displacement internationally, and developmental cultural neurobiology. We also identify culturally meaningful sources of resilience and provide a review of the existing literature on interventions supporting adolescent mothers and their offspring. We aim to honor Edward Zigler's groundbreaking life and career by integrating basic developmental science with applied intervention and policy.

War, disasters, trafficking and immigration are tearing millions of children from their parents all around the world. A psychologist explores how to help them recover.

Parent–child separation occurs for many reasons, both involuntary and voluntary. We review the effects on children and youth of parent–child separation due to several of the most common reasons that are responsible for the growth in this family circumstance worldwide. These include early institutionalization; war, persecution, and conflict; separation during asylum; trafficking; conscription into armed conflict; and being left behind when parents migrate for economic or other reasons. Overall, the effects of parent–child separation are consistently negative on children's social-emotional development, well-being, and mental health. They are more severe when the separation is prolonged or accompanied by other forms of deprivation or victimization. Mitigating and protective factors include earlier stable family placement in the case of early institutionalization, parent–child communication and parenting quality, and community support in the host community. We conclude with an evaluation of group, school-based, and community-based interventions for children and youth affected by parent–child separation.

Exposure to community violence is thought to create risk for the social and emotional development of children, including those children living in low-income, conflict-affected countries. In the absence of other types of community resources, schools may be one of the few community resources that can help buffer children from the negative effects of community violence exposure. We sampled 8,300 students ranging in age from 6–18 years in 123 schools from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to examine whether and how two distinct dimensions of positive school climate can protect two key features of children's social-emotional development in the presence of community violence. Multi-level models tested the hypothesis that students’ perceptions of a positive school climate moderated the relation between community violence and self-reported mental health problems and peer victimization. Findings support the hypothesis. Specifically, a positive school climate protected against mental health problems and peer victimization in the presence of high community violence. Students who experienced high community violence and a negative school climate generally demonstrated the worst development. We find complex interactions between the dimensions of school climate and exposure to violence on student social-emotional development that highlight the salience of children's contexts for developmental studies in low-income countries. We use dynamic developmental systems theory and differential impact to discuss the dual potential of schools as a buffer against the effects of violence or as a source of compounded risk.

The Rapid Assessment of Cognitive and Emotional Regulation (RACER) is a tablet-based assessment tool for children that measures executive function (EF) skills. Instructions that are brief and visually presented; game-like tasks are designed to easily engage children regardless of literacy level and variable test administration settings. RACER measures inhibitory control and working memory. This study presents the theoretical rationale and empirical evidence for tablet-based assessments of EF, the process of administering the RACER assessments. The current sample consists of students in Lebanon (N=1900) and Niger (N=850). The results indicate that individual differences in EF can be assessed by the RACER tablet tasks. Specifically, we demonstrate that EF scores are associated in expected ways with age and that tasks function similarly to what has been observed in high-income countries. The feasibility and utility for researchers, practitioners, and clinicians, of this cognitive assessment tool is discussed.

While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process.

This chapter discusses the roles of transnational multiple stakeholder partnerships in addressing development and implementation challenges affecting youth and children in both rich as well as low- and middle-income countries. We first discuss each of five major sets of stakeholders –national governments; community members; civil society organizations; the private sector; and researchers – in terms of their stakes in working towards SDG progress. Then we present how networks across these groups (e.g. at national, regional and global levels, or Multiple Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs), can help achieve progress, with several current examples. Throughout we balance discussion of challenges, strengths and opportunities in both individual stakeholder approaches and MSPs. We also place special emphasis on the role of research in general and developmental science in particular, in the work of MSPs on the Sustainable Development Goals.

This special section of Child Development brings together experts in developmental science and intervention research to incorporate current evidence on resilience for vulnerable populations and give concrete suggestions for action and research. This commentary synthesizes the contributions of the articles, noting themes such as simultaneous attention to multiple risk, protective, and promotive processes; integrating new principles from clinical and therapeutic interventions; and adapting intervention approaches for new populations. It then describes additional directions for interventions to maximize resilience, including approaches that address social psychological processes, issues related to demographic and other forms of diversity, policy-related individual behaviors, and sequenced interventions across the life span. It also gives suggestions for integrating implementation science on expansion and scale with behavioral intervention science.

In September 2016, the member states of the United Nations completed the process of adopting and defining indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; United Nations, 2015). Developed through a three-year, worldwide participatory process, these 17 goals and 169 targets represent a global consensus on the part of U.N. member nations towards an inclusive, sustainable world, centered around ensuring equity in all countries at a time of great environmental and humanitarian crises. This Social Policy Report describes the central role of supporting child and youth development in achieving the vision behind the U.N. Sustainable Development Agenda. The report then addresses the importance of developmental science in achieving the aims of the Sustainable Development Agenda through generating knowledge of child and youth development in diverse contexts, monitoring and measurement to reveal patterns of success and inequity, and building capacity for developmental science in all countries. We emphasize the goal that most clearly encompasses development from birth to young adulthood (SDG 4) and also describe the relevance of developmental science to the other goals.