Areas of Work

Improving Outcomes For Young Children
Contact: Sam Stephens

Much is known about how to improve the outcomes for individual children pre-natally through their early school years. However, as a nation, we continue to struggle with how to improve outcomes for all, or nearly all, children in a neighborhood, community, state or more broadly in the nation as a whole.

Children thrive best when they are raised in a loving and nurturing environment, when attention is paid to their health and positive emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual and physical development, when they spend their time in stable, safe (lead-free), non-violent and developmentally appropriate in-home or out-of-home settings. This is most likely to occur when their families and communities can provide an array of positive activities and opportunities for socialization, play, learning and maturation. Research suggests that this combination of supports and environments promotes the normal development of babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers, and can, if intensive enough, overcome many of the barriers to positive development linked to poverty, poor birth outcomes, physical limitations and disabling conditions, and chaotic families or neighborhoods. Recently-published research about how the brain develops reinforces our understanding that protective factors include: consistent attachment to a few adults (including fathers); parenting and care taking that is responsive to a child's need for both stimulation and repose; care taking that accounts for the normal periods of disorganization in child development; early intervention and treatment to offset developmental delays; efforts to build on a child's resilience; and supports that are respectful of parents' expertise, values and cultural backgrounds.

Our work is often aimed at helping families, schools, communities and states strengthen their abilities to provide these factors, supports and environments for the broadest possible number of children. We do this in many ways in many projects. A major focus of CAPD's work is on issues related to positive development broadly defined (being healthy and thriving rather than simply avoiding poor outcomes) for young children. Sometimes these issues are considered under the rubric of "school readiness," but our approach is to help the program, agency or community with which we are working to understand how the experiences and conditions of young children, even prior to birth, help set the stage for their success in the early years of school. Our work in this area includes measurement and tracking of early childhood and early school outcomes as well as strategic planning for comprehensive approaches to program development and system change. It sometimes focuses on particular groups of children such as children of color and those born to young (adolescent) parents.

Related Web Sites:

• Chapin Hall
• Child Trends
• Children's Defense Fund
• Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics
• Kids Count/City Kids Count
• National Alliance for Hispanic Health>
• National Black Child Development Institute
• The Touchpoints Project
• Zero to Three