In June, we hosted a webinar about our latest Working Paper, Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development, which examines how a wide range of conditions in the places where children live, grow, play, and learn can shape how children develop. The paper examines the many ways in which the built and natural environment surrounding a child can affect their development, emphasizes how the latest science can help deepen our understanding, and points towards promising opportunities to re-design environments so that all children can grow up in homes and neighborhoods free of hazards and rich with opportunity. Corey Zimmerman, our Chief Program Officer, moderated a discussion around these themes between Dr. Lindsey Burghardt (Chief Science Officer) and Dr. Dominique Lightsey-Joseph (Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy) which has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast.  

• Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development

Tassy Warren: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Tassy Warren, the Center’s Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer. Our Center believes that advances in the science of child development provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and their caregivers. By sharing the latest science from the field, we hope to help you make that science actionable and apply it in your work in ways that can increase your impact.

In June, we hosted a webinar about our latest Working Paper, Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development, which examines how a wide range of conditions in the places where children live, grow, play, and learn can shape how childre

During the webinar, Corey Zimmerman, our Chief Program Officer, moderated a discussion around these themes between Dr. Lindsey Burghardt (Chief Science Officer) and Dr. Dominique Lightsey-Joseph (Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy) which we’re happy to share with you all on today’s episode. To access the full Working Paper and related publications, please visit our website at developingchild.harvard.edu.

Now, without further ado, here’s Corey Zimmerman.

Corey Zimmerman: Hi, everybody. Welcome. I’m Corey Zimmerman. I’m the Chief Program Officer here at the Center on the Developing Child, and today we’re going to be discussing a paper, the name of it is Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundation of Healthy Development. This paper was written by our National Scientific Council on Developing Child and was released earlier this year in March.

We see this webinar as an opportunity to begin to understand a broader frame for thinking about what influences early childhood development, the role that inequity plays in influencing the environment children are in, and third, some early thoughts on new actors or sectors that might be called upon given this broader frame, to be able to join us in our collective effort to improve outcomes for all children and their families.

Okay. With that, let’s get started. It is my pleasure to introduce you to my two colleagues, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, who is the Chief Science Officer here at the Center on the Developing Child. And then second, Dr. Dominique Lightsey-Joseph, who is our Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy here at the Center. Okay. So we’re going to start with a brief overview of the Working Paper, Place Matters from Dr. Burghardt.

Lindsey Burghardt: Thank you again, Corey, for that introduction. And thanks to all of you today who took time out of your day to join us and to hear about this new working paper from the National Scientific Council. So the overall focus of this paper is really to broaden the frame of how we’re talking about early childhood development and health. And we’re going to look upstream today and consider all the different factors that influence how kids develop.

So we all experience this continuous influx and flow of influences from our environments, and they begin before birth right in the earliest days of the prenatal period, and they continue throughout our lives. And these influences include the environments of relationships and those environments–that environment of relationships–is just as important as it’s ever been. And children also experience exposures and influences from the physical environment that surrounds them and their caregivers.

So particularly the built and natural environments. And there are a really wide range of conditions in places where children live, learn, play and grow, and all these conditions have the ability to get under the skin and affect the developing brain and also other biological systems. So the immune system, the microbiome and the metabolic system, among others. And beginning before birth, these environmental conditions are shaping how children develop and that, in turn, has the ability to shape their lifelong physical and mental health.

So the built and natural environments and the systemic factors that shape them, like policies that influence where people are able to live and how resources are distributed, interact with each other and they interact with a child’s social environment in really deeply interconnected ways. So this is really what we mean when we say that place matters. So every environment is infused with a combination of influences, and these influences can have positive or negative effects on health and development.

And it’s also really important to recognize that level of exposure to risk and access to opportunity for children are not distributed equally. So in 2004, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child described the effects of early life experiences on the developing brain and its first working paper called Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships. And over the two decades that followed, this concept really helped to make the case for caregiver-child relationships is sort of the active ingredient in how environments can influence the architecture of the developing brain. So the environment of relationships includes the presence of responsive relationships, the presence of significant stress and adversity, caregiver well-being, social connectedness, community support, faith and cultural traditions. And so more recently as our understanding of how early the early origins of health and disease have advanced, we’ve also really started to understand how early experiences affect multiple developing biological systems beyond the brain. So thinking about the immune system, the metabolic system, the respiratory system, and actually how these systems are interacting with each other and shaping each other as well as the brain. So the environment of relationships again, is just as important as it’s ever been, but these environments–that environment or relationship–it doesn’t exist in isolation; it exists in the context of is much broader environments that include the built and natural environments that surround children.

Exposures from the natural and the built environments also directly shape the development of biological systems inside the body, and they interact with adult-child relationships in a really deeply interconnected way. And these exposures can be positive or negative, and they can include things like air quality and temperature that children breathe, the purity and availability of their water supply, their ability to access safe green space and healthy housing and whether or not they’re exposed to things like environmental toxicants.

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