Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
behaviors, far fewer children were expelled. Today, half of the states provide early childhood mental health consultation (Perry, 2014). Consider how many young children are being better served because of the research and advocacy of Dr. Gilliam.
Social policy: Policies that are intended to promote the welfare of individuals in a society.
Another example of social policy in action is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides supplemental food and nutrition education for low-income, nutritionally at-risk women, infants, and children up to age 5. Good nutrition during a woman’s pregnancy helps ensure the healthy development of her baby, and good nutrition during early childhood is associated with a number of positive outcomes throughout a child’s life. Although these outcomes are important, the WIC program cost almost $6.2 billion in 2015 (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2017b). When an expensive program such as this one is up for renewal, lawmakers look to experts in the field for research that can justify the expenditure.
The Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC). This pregnant woman can use vouchers from the WIC program at a farmers’ market to help provide her with the nutritious diet that is essential for healthy prenatal development. Research that shows the effectiveness of such programs helps ensure their continued funding.
The Washington Post / Contributor via GettyImages
Research on WIC has found that participation in the program is associated with a reduced risk of having a low-birth-weight or premature baby (Rossin-Slater, 2015). As you will learn in Chapter 4, both prematurity and low birth weight are associated with a number of negative developmental outcomes. The lifetime savings from the lower cost of medical care needed as a result of the increased birth weight of the children born to WIC participants means that the benefits of the program outweigh its cost (Rossin-Slater, 2015). Information such as this helps policymakers evaluate the effectiveness of social programs and make modifications to them, if necessary. Active Learning: Social Policy Affecting Children and Adolescents provides some additional information about the types of issues social policy organizations have focused on in recent years.
Active Learning: Social Policy Affecting Children and Adolescents
A number of organizations in the United States provide legislators and private citizens with information related to child development with the goal of helping bring about changes in social policy based on solid research. This activity will guide you to their websites to retrieve information that interests you.
The mission of the Future of Children (2017) is “to translate the best social science research about children and youth into information that is useful to policymakers, practitioners, grant-makers, advocates, the media, and students of public policy.” You will find the website at https://futureofchildren.princeton.edu. This organization publishes one journal issue and one policy brief each year, each devoted to a single topic. Recent topics have included Children and Climate Change, Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited, Policies to Promote Child Health, and Starting Early: Education from Prekindergarten to Third Grade.
The Society for Research in Child Development is a professional organization that periodically produces policy briefs on topics related to child development. Go to its home page at https://www.srcd.org and use the dropdown menu under “Publications” to select “Social Policy Report.” On that page, you will find a list of their recent reports, which have included Supporting Parents: How Six Decades of Parenting Research Can Inform Policy and Best Practice; Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools; and Development of Boys and Young Men of Color.
The mission of The Annie E. Casey Foundation (2017) is to “advance research and solutions to overcome the barriers to success, help communities demonstrate what works and influence decision makers to invest in strategies based on solid evidence.” From its home page at www.aecf.org, click on one of the headings (Kids, Families, Communities, or Leaders) and it will take you to a page that lists recent reports, blogs, and policy statements related to that topic.
There is a wealth of information at each site. You can visit at least one site now and identify a topic or two that interest you, review the information available, and make a mental note to visit these sites again when you are looking for up-to-date information for a future course paper.
You can also use one of the most widely utilized resources from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to create a state, county, or city report on a topic that interests you. The Foundation’s annual Kids Count report provides up-to-date statistics on children’s health, education, and well-being. From the Kids Count Data Center (https://datacenter.kidscount.org/), you can select your state, and on the next page you can click on “create a custom report.” Proceed by selecting a level for your report and then choosing the specific information that interests you. Note that there are several hundred indicators of child well-being, so if you don’t limit your research by your choices, you will receive a very informative but lengthy report.
Making social policy. Social policy that affects children and families is made at the highest levels of the federal government down to local school boards and neighborhood councils. Interested citizens also take part in the process when they write letters to elected officials, sign petitions, work for causes they support, and vote.
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As citizens, we bear a responsibility to vote and to speak out for the well-being of our children. The more we understand about their needs, the more effective we will be in advocating on their behalf and supporting the policies we believe will best serve them.
Check Your Understanding
Knowledge Questions
1 What are some reasons for studying child development?
2 Who is likely to benefit from being knowledgeable about child development?
3 What is the relationship between social policy and research on child development?
Critical Thinking
What do you think would be the most effective ways for you, as a student, to impact social policy affecting children and families?
Understanding How Development Happens
>> LQ 1.2 What are the domains of child development and some recurring issues in the field?
We have a lot of interesting ground to cover, and if you are to get a solid foundation in understanding child development it’s good to have a plan that breaks this journey down into manageable pieces. To do that, we have organized information in this book by the ages and stages of life, then further divide information into the different domains of development: physical, cognitive, and social-emotional. There also have been a number of topics that have been debated in the field of child development over the years. We briefly introduce you to several of these issues here and revisit them at various points throughout the book.
Ages and Stages
We use the