El especialista en desarrollo de la niñez de New York University, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, explica por qué los primeros tres años de vida son claves en el desarrollo del ser humano, a partir del desarrollo de su cerebro, y por tanto en la reducción de la delincuencia juvenil.

As policy makers and practitioners work to increase access to early childhood education (ECE) and to improve the quality of existing services, it is important that the field consider the perspective of a key stakeholder: parents. This study analyzes 33 interviews with parents of young children in urban Ghana. The interviews investigate (1) what parents believe to be the purpose of ECE, and (2) parents’ perspective on what and how young children should learn. Results are analyzed around five themes: play, homework, mobility, language and diversity, and age of entry into school. Implications for global ECE policy are discussed.

Little is known about how the experience of an earthquake affects young children's cognitive outcomes. On February 27, 2010, a severe earthquake shook southern Chile. The earthquake occurred during the course of a large-scale evaluation of an early childhood education intervention (child average age=53 months) in Santiago, such that one cohort of children (n=698) experienced baseline data collection 3–12 weeks after the earthquake occurred, while a different cohort of children (n=720) did not. In this paper, we used these available evaluation data to conduct two sets of analyses that explore the relationship between preschool children’s exposure to the 2010 Chilean earthquake and their early language, pre-literacy, mathematics and executive function outcomes. In the first set of analyses, we employed a propensity score analysis to estimate the short-term effect of the earthquake on preschool- aged children’s early learning and executive function outcomes. Results suggest that children who experienced the earthquake had lower scores on some early language and pre-literacy assessments than those who did not, with effect sizes of approximately 20% of a standard deviation. Results from the second set of analyses suggest that among the families who experienced the earthquake, children whose parents reported more earthquake- related stressors performed significantly lower on some early language and pre-literacy outcomes. Implications of these findings for disaster relief efforts and future research are discussed.

The post 2015 context for international development has led to a demand for assessments that measure multiple dimensions of children's school readiness and are feasibly administered in low-resource settings. The present study assesses the construct validity of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) developed by Save the Children using data from a sample of children (∼5 years of age; N=682) from rural Ethiopia. The study (a) uses exploratory and confirmatory bi-factor analyses to assess the internal structure of the assessment with respect to four hypothesized domains of school-readiness (Early Numeracy, Early Literacy, Social-Emotional development, and Motor development); (b) uses latent regression to examine concurrent validity of the domains against a limited set of child and family characteristics; and (c) establishes measurement invariance across three focal comparisons (children enrolled in center-based care versus home-based care; girls versus boys; and treatment status in a cluster randomized controlled trial of a center-based program). The results support the conclusion that the IDELA is useful for making inferences about children's school readiness. Implications for future use of the IDELA and similar instruments are discussed.

The South African government offers three main services to improve the developmental potential and overall well-being of the country's children: cash grants, health care, and education. There is research to suggest that receiving supports to the household in multiple domains simultaneously might improve children's development over and above improvements to development that are typically experienced when receiving a single developmental support, however, no research to date has empirically examined the patterns by which these services may be received, the associated quality of these services, the multilevel characteristics of children and their households that might predict receiving particular patterns of services, or the relationship between service receipt and children's academic and cognitive development in a natural (non-experimental) environment in South Africa. This paper uses three-step latent class analysis to explore patterns of receipt of the three primary government-provided services, the child-, caregiver-, household-, and community-level factors that predict receipt of these patterns, and the associations between service receipt patterns and the academic and cognitive outcomes of low-income 7–10year old children living in peri-urban and rural regions of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, while accounting for potential sources of selection bias. Results revealed three service receipt patterns: primarily education, primarily cash grants and education, and all three services, showed that household level factors were most predictive of service receipt such that the most economically disadvantaged households were likely to receive the most services, and found that children receiving more services had poorer math outcomes as compared to children receiving fewer services.

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.

Despite increased investment in early childhood care and education (ECCE) globally, little is known about its effectiveness in low-income countries. Using kernel exact matching within a national sample of 1,623 Zambian 6-year-olds, we test the associations between ECCE participation and seven domains of children's school readiness. We find ECCE participation to be significantly and positively predictive of children's receptive vocabulary, letter naming, reasoning, fine motor, executive function, and task performance skills (d = 0.20 − 0.65). Although ECCE predicted better outcomes across program types and dosage levels, associations between ECCE participation and school readiness were descriptively if not significantly larger for children attending nonprofit (versus governmental or private) programs and for those attending ECCE between three and five hours per day (versus those attending less than three or six or more hours per day). Implications of these findings, particularly for the 68% of Zambian children who remain out of ECCE, are discussed.

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.

We present here as the overarching “promising practice” a research-practice partnership dedicated to iterative cycles of action and research. In 2016-2017, the IRC delivered non-formal retention-focused tutoring support, also known as remedial programming, to 6,400 children enrolled in public schools in Lebanon and Niger using its Learning in a Healing Classroom (LIHC) program. LIHC is an evidence-based approach to providing reading and math courses in safe and supportive learning environments. Sites were additionally randomized to embed low-cost, targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions into the curriculum. TIES/ NYU then conducted a site-randomized trial to provide the first rigorous evidence of whether and how non-formal, SEL-based retention support education programs can bolster refugee children’s ability to succeed in formal education systems, as well as some of the first evidence globally on how targeted SEL practices can be embedded in curriculum to support children’s holistic learning and development. We share the lessons learned from both the interventions and from the partnership, focusing on the work in Lebanon.