Contents PodcastPanelistsAdditional ResourcesTranscriptIn April 2024, we hosted a webinar where we explored the science from our latest working paper, Extreme Heat Affects Early Childhood Development and Health. The Center’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, joined by Dr. Kari Nadeau, Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, brought the latest research and insights from the field to discuss the intersection of heat, early childhood development, and health equity. They also discussed actionable solutions to benefit children, caregivers, and communities now and in the future. The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast.

Panelists Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP

Chief Science Officer, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD

Chair of the Department of Environmental Health, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health Rebecca Hansen, MFA (Webinar Host)

Director of Communications, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Cameron Seymour-Hawkins (Podcast Host)

Communications Coordinator, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Additional Resources

• Extreme Heat Affects Early Childhood Development and Health
• Heat: An Action Guide for Policy
• Webinar Recording: Extreme Heat and Early Childhood Development
• Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development
• Place Matters: What Surrounds Us Shapes Us

Transcript

Cameron Seymour-Hawkins: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Cameron Seymour-Hawkins, the Center’s Communications Coordinator. 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 April, we hosted a webinar where we explored the science from our latest working paper, Extreme Heat Affects Early Childhood Development and Health. 

The Center’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, joined by Dr. Kari Nadeau, Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, brought the latest research and insights from the field to discuss the intersection of heat, early childhood development, and health equity. They also discussed actionable solutions to benefit children, caregivers, and communities now and in the future. 

We’re excited to share this conversation on today’s episode of the Brain Architects.  

Now, without further ado, here’s Rebecca Hansen, the Center’s Director of Communications, who will set the stage for our conversation. 

Rebecca Hansen: Hello, everyone, and welcome. We’re very happy to have you all with us for today’s webinar, Extreme Heat and Early Childhood Development: A discussion on rising temperatures and strategies for supporting development and lifelong health. Whether you’re joining us for the first time or have been a regular at our webinars here at the Center on the Developing Child, we are very happy to have you with us today. 

So, today’s webinar is grounded in the first working paper from the Early Childhood Scientific Council on Equity and the Environment. The council is a multidisciplinary group that synthesizes and communicates about emerging science that can help to improve our understanding of how influences from the broader environment affect early childhood development and also lifelong health. The council’s first working paper, published earlier this year, focuses on the many ways that heat can affect development, including its impact on young children’s biological systems and how it can amplify the effects of systemic inequities. 

The paper offers strategies to mitigate the impact of extreme temperatures and points toward actionable solutions for cooling the communities where children live, grow, learn, and play. And we look forward to diving into these strategies throughout today’s conversation. 

So, without further ado, I am going to introduce our panel, starting with a note that while we had hoped to be joined today by Dr. Gaurab Basu, he was unfortunately unable to be here. We do have with us Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, who is Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child, where she develops and leads the center scientific agenda. She is also founding director of the Early Childhood Scientific Council for Equity and the Environment and leads their efforts to synthesize and communicate about the scientific mechanisms related to how children’s environments shape their development. Dr. Burghardt engages regularly with diverse stakeholders and audiences, with the aim of making the science both accessible and actionable. She is also a practicing primary care pediatrician in the community outside of Boston. 

Dr. Burghardt is joined today by Dr. Kari Nadeau, who is chair of the Department of Environmental Health, and John Rock, professor of climate and population studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Nadeau is a practicing clinician specializing in allergy, asthma and immunology in children and adults, and she has published over 400 papers, many in the field of climate change and health, for more than 30 years. She has devoted herself to understanding how environmental and genetic factors affect the risk of developing allergies and asthma, especially wildfire induced air pollution. Her laboratory has been studying air pollution and wildfire effects on children and adults, including wildland firefighters. Dr. Nadeau is also a member of the Early Childhood Scientific Council on Equity and the Environment. And we are very happy to have her here with us today. 

And with that, I will turn it over to Dr. Burghardt to begin our discussion.  

Lindsey Burghardt: Thanks, Rebecca. I’m so excited for this conversation today. Thrilled to have Kari here with us. I’m just going to start by setting the stage a little bit for why this feels like such a timely and important conversation. And then we’ll dive right in. You know, I think many of us have recognized from our own experiences that temperatures are rising around the world. And, you know, science is confirming we’re having record setting heatwaves that are happening more often and they’re lasting longer than they have ever before. So I think with these increasing temperatures and with the increased frequency of these events, it makes this topic really timely and important because it’s something that’s already affecting kids and their caregivers today. And we know that excessive heat impacts kids development, both in the moment, but also potentially across their lifespan. And the good news is that there’s a lot of solutions that already exist and that communities are putting into effect already with really good results. So we’re going to talk today about how extreme heat affects development, the potential effects in pregnancy and throughout early childhood, and then get into some of those actionable solutions and thinking about how heat works to affect development. We really know that it starts with an understanding that environment influenced all children’s development by shaping the exposures and the experiences that they have. And this developmental environment is really the full range of exposures and experiences that they have in places where they live and learn and play and grow. And so what’s surrounding children is quite literally shaping their biology. But importantly, you know, these experiences and exposures can be positive or they can be negative. So environments can have exposures and experiences that fuel positive development, things like really strong foundational relationships with their caregivers and access to green space and breathing clean air. Or they can be more negative or potentially derail development. So things like extreme heat or breathing toxic air from wildfire smoke. 

So climate change is coming in and it’s creating and shaping changes to this environment of exposures and experiences. And it’s really important to understand, too, that these effects are not only direct on their biology, like breathing in their toxic wildfire smoke, but they’re also indirect and that things like extreme weather events and flooding can cause displacement that then places enormous stress on caregivers, which then has an important effect on those foundational relationships. And when it comes to climate change, this is just the first in a series of conversation that we’re hoping to have about how climate change is shaping developmental environments. And today we’re going to talk about Heat and, Kari, it’s just so amazing and special to have you join this conversatio...

In October 2024, we hosted a webinar where we explored the science from our latest working paper, A Cascade of Impacts: The Many Ways Water Affects Child Development. The discussion was led by the Center’s Chief Science Officer, Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP, and featured Devon Payne-Sturges, DrPH, Associate Professor with the Department of Global, Environmental, and Occupational Health at the University of Maryland, School of Public Health, and Nathaniel Harnett, PhD, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In this podcast, learn about the many ways water affects early childhood health and well-being as well as actionable strategies and policy solutions that can support clean water access for all children and their caregivers.  The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast.

In March 2024, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our third installment: “A Place to Play: Moving Towards Fairness of Place for All Children.” During the webinar, we explored the power of play in supporting early childhood development, as well as the importance of ensuring that children and caregivers have access to safe green spaces, like parks and playgrounds. Our panel of experts discussed how access to safe, stimulating, and joyful play space is not equally distributed across communities, along with strategies to work toward building a future where all children have a safe place to play. The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast.

Cameron Seymour-Hawkins: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Cameron Seymour-Hawkins, the Center’s Communications Coordinator. 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 March, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our third installment: “A Place to Play: Moving Towards Fairness of Place for All Children.” During the webinar, we explored how play and a family’s access to safe green spaces, like parks and playgrounds, support early development. Our panel of experts discussed how access to safe, stimulating, and joyful play space is not equally distributed along with strategies to work toward building a future where all children have a safe place to play. We’re excited to share part of this conversation on today’s episode of the Brain Architects podcast.  

If you’re interested in in seeing some examples of community-led solutions to address gaps in play space equity presented by Lysa Ratliff of KABOOM and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Playful Learning Landscapes, we encourage you to head over to our YouTube channel to view the full webinar recording.  

Now, without further ado, here’s Melissa Rivard, the Center’s Assistant Director of Innovation Strategies, who will set the stage for our conversation. 

Melissa Rivard: Welcome and thank you all so much for joining us today. It’s really gratifying to have so many of you showing up for this really important topic. So thank you. I’m Melissa Rivard, Assistant Director of Innovation Strategies and I will be your host today. This webinar is part of a series of webinars that the Center on the Developing Child has hosted to examine the ways that a child’s broader environment, including the built and natural environments, as well as the systemic factors that shape them, play a role in shaping child development and health beginning before birth. Our focus today, the importance for all children to have access to stimulating joyful and safe places to play, is prompted by our focus on fairness of place as well as a desire to highlight a long standing collaboration between the Center on the Developing Child and the LEGO Foundation, and our shared belief in both the power of the early years and in the power of play to positively impact lifelong learning and health. Our moderator for the conversation is Leah Anyanwu. Leah is a program specialist at the LEGO Foundation, where she supports the Foundation’s early childhood portfolio with a focus on children displaced due to conflict and climate. Leah is a passionate educator and advocate with over a decade of experience working in education with a focus on early childhood and education systems reform. Along with Leah, we’ll be joined for this discussion by a phenomenal group of panelists who bring a wide range of expertise related to this topic. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is a professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. She served as president of the International Congress for Infant Studies, was on the Governing Board of the Society for Research in Child Development and is on the board of 0 to 3. In 2010, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek founded Playful Learning Landscapes with her colleagues, an initiative that reimagines cities and public squares as places with science infused designs that enhance academic and social learning opportunities for young children. And we have Lysa Ratliff, who is CEO of KABOOM!, a national nonprofit that works to end play space inequity. Lysa is a leading national advocate for equitable access to play spaces, has been invited to speak at several White House events and engages with members of federal, state and local public offices advocating for and creating opportunities for kids to play across the nation. We’re also joined by Le-Quyen Vu, who is Executive Director of the Indochinese American Council in Philadelphia, a nonprofit working to empower disadvantaged and minoritized groups and newly arrived refugees and immigrants in their community to achieve social, economic and educational advancement and mobility. And Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a member of the Atlanta Board of Education, Seat 8 at large who’s been instrumental in passing a number of policy initiatives, such as the historic Equity Policy, the Atlanta Community School Parks Initiative and the Atlanta Public Schools Center for Equity and Social Justice. Without further ado, I am so pleased to hand the baton to you, Leah.  

Leah Anyanwu: Thank you and welcome, everyone. I am so excited to hear from each of our panelists about the critical work connected to play equity and for this conversation, which centers the power of play and the importance of safe and quality play spaces. Our aspiration at the LEGO Foundation is that children become creative, engaged, lifelong learners who thrive in a constantly changing world by experiencing the benefits of learning through play. The scientific evidence around the power of play is clear and growing. In short, play is essential, everyone. Not only is play the best way for children to learn and to thrive, but play builds the foundations of lifelong learning and fosters holistic development. We’re here today because there is so much opportunity for children, families and communities when it comes to play and creating spaces that invite and enhance it at the community level in policy development and in the work that brings each of us to this conversation today. Yet we have a long way to go towards ensuring that the opportunity for quality play is equally accessible to all children, families and communities. To quote the Place Matters paper that Melissa just mentioned, “just as dimensions of the built and natural environment have been designed over time, they can be redesigned to support healthy development.” Throughout our conversation today, we will share insights from research and the field about ways to redesign, to rethink and to rebuild in pursuit of creating environments that support all children’s copy development. Now, without further ado, let’s get started. And I really want to invite Kathy to really focus first on the why. So, Kathy, good to have you here. What does this science tell us about why play matters for children, particularly young children? And ...

In December 2023, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our second installment: “Understanding Racism’s Impact on Child Development: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” During the webinar, Stephanie Curenton, PhD, Nathaniel Harnett, PhD, Mavis Sanders, PhD, and Natalie Slopen, ScD, discussed their latest research, exploring how racism gets “under the skin” to impact children’s development and how it contributes to unequal access to opportunity in the places where children live, grow, play, and learn. Together, they explored ways to dismantle systemic barriers and work toward solutions that promote healthy child development. The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast. 

Cameron Seymour-Hawkins: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Cameron Seymour-Hawkins, the Center’s Communications Coordinator.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 December, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our second installment: “Understanding Racism’s Impact on Child Development: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” During the webinar, Doctors Stephanie Curenton, Nathaniel Harnett, Mavis Sanders, and Natalie Slopen, discussed their latest research, exploring how racism gets “under the skin” to impact children’s development and how it contributes to unequal access to opportunity in the places where children live, grow, play, and learn. Together, they explored ways to dismantle systemic barriers and work toward solutions that promote healthy child development. We’re excited to share this conversation on today’s episode of the Brain Architects podcast.

Now, without further ado, here’s Tassy Warren, the Center’s Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer, who will set the stage for our conversation.

Tassy Warren: Hello. Welcome to today’s webinar. Understanding Racism’s Impact on Child Development. Working towards fairness of place in the United States. We’re so excited to bring you into this conversation. Whether you’re joining us for the first time or are a regular to the Center on the Developing Child, thank you for being here today. This webinar is part of our Place Matters Webinar series. The series is designed to expand upon our Center’s recent work on how influences from our environments, particularly the built in natural environments, play a role in shaping early childhood development beginning before birth. Throughout this series, we’re highlighting scientific and community expertise and offering strategies to work towards fairness of place and to create the conditions that will allow all children to thrive. Today’s conversation will explore the intersection between policy, systemic inequalities, racial disparities, and children’s healthy development. We hope that you’ll gain insights that are helpful to you in the work you do in support of children and families. And thank you to everyone who submitted questions when registering for this event. We received hundreds of submitted questions, so we’ll be asking some of those questions in the second half of the conversation. Of course, we will not have time to address all the questions that are submitted or we would be here for days. But we were really intrigued going through all of the questions that were submitted. And we appreciate the thought-provoking ideas that you all brought to mind for us. So we will be thinking about how those questions can inform future conversations.

So I am really excited in just a second to hand it over to Dr. Stephanie Curenton, who we are incredibly lucky to have leading this conversation for us today. Dr. Curenton is a professor in the Education Leadership and Policy Studies department at Boston University. Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and is the Director of the Center on the Ecology of Early Development, or CEED.

CEED’S research and initiatives serve to inform policies that promote equity and justice for racially and ethnically minoritized children in the context of education, health and community. She is joined today by an outstanding panel of researchers Dr. Nathaniel Harnett, Dr. Mavis Sanders, and Dr. Natalie Slopen. Dr. Harnett is Director of the Neurobiology of Affective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital and an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Harnett’s research is focused on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate susceptibility to trauma and stress related disorders. Dr. Sanders is a Senior Research Scholar of Black Children and Families at Child Trends, where she leads in applied research agenda that advances racial equity and social justice. Before joining Child Trends in 2021, Dr. Sanders served as a professor of education and affiliate professor in the doctoral program in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Dr. Slopen is an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Slopen is a social epidemiologist, and her research focuses on social and contextual factors that shape childhood development and inequities in health. Now, I’ll let Dr. Curenton share more about herself and kick off our conversation.

Stephanie Curenton: Hello, everyone. I am honored to be here to moderate this conversation and to represent CEED as well as Boston University. As Tassy was saying, our work at CEED specifically focuses on understanding how racism impacts Black children’s growth and development and ways in which families use their cultural assets and social capital to protect themselves from the harm of racism.

And we know that this conversation we’re having today is critically important because racism operates on multiple levels and it impacts young children throughout all levels of their biology, their social development and other ecological systems. And in the prenatal phase and the first years of life, they are the most sensitive developmental period. So it’s really critical to understand how racism exerts its impact on the health and growth of prenatal children and infants and toddlers.

As a scholar myself, I’ve been investigating and doing work on the topic of racism in young children’s learning for decades. By the fall of 2024, CEED, along with our partners at Equity Research Action Coalition, will be publishing a special issue for Early Childhood Research Quarterly on this topic, featuring researchers from a variety of disciplines and highlighting the work of several junior scholars.

So the scientific evidence is clear, and it’s growing that racism imposes unique and substantial stressors on the daily lives of families and caregivers. And understanding how these stressors affect child health and development provides a compelling framework for understanding and protecting young children. Such frameworks are the Rise Three Model, for which I’m a coauthor with Dr. Iheoma Iruka.

It presents new ideas about how communities, policies, programs and funding streams might confront and dismantle inequalities and build a stronger future for all of us. But we’re here today because there is so much opportunity ahead of us at the community level, at the policy level, and in all the work that brings each of us to this conversation today, as the Center on the Developing Child wrote in Their Place Matters paper that was published earlier this year.

It says just as dimensions of the built and natural environment have been designed over time, they can be redesigned to support healthy development. So throughout our discussion today, we will share ways to redesign, rethink and advance forward in pursuit of creating environments that are anti-racist and can support all children’s healthy development. And with that, I’m so excited to be moderating this conversation with...

In the fall of 2023, we kicked off our three-part Place Matters webinar series with our first installment: “A New Lens on Poverty: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” The webinar discussion featured the work of Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, MPH, FAAP, whose research uncovered the water crisis in Flint, H. Luke Shaefer, PhD, co-author of the new book The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, and their groundbreaking new program, RxKids, an innovative effort to address child poverty and improve health equity. This conversation, moderated by our Chief Science Officer, Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP, has been adapted for the Brain Architects podcast.  

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

Amelia Johnson: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Amelia Johnson, the Center’s Communications Specialist. 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 October, we kicked off our three-part Place Matters webinar series with our first installment: “A New Lens on Poverty: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” During the webinar, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, our Chief Science Officer, moderated a discussion between Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, whose research uncovered the water crisis in Flint, and H. Luke Shaefer, co-author of the new book The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America. The resulting explores how the qualities of the places where people live are shaped by historic and current policies, which have created deep disadvantage across many communities with important implications for the health and development of the children who live there. We’re happy to share these insights with you all on today’s episode. 

Now, without further ado, here’s Rebecca Hansen, the Center’s Director of Communications, who will set the stage with a brief overview of the webinar series. 

Rebecca Hansen: Alright, hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Hansen, and I’m the Director of Communications here at the Center on the Developing Child. And I’m very excited to welcome you all to today’s webinar, A New Lens on Poverty: Working Toward Fairness of Place in the United States. This webinar is the first in an ongoing series designed to examine the many ways that a child’s broader environment, including the built and natural environments, as well as the systemic factors that shape those environments, all play a role in shaping early childhood development beginning before birth. In this series, we will explore various environment tool influences from both scientific and community-based perspectives, including strategies to work toward fairness of place and improve existing conditions to allow all children to thrive. I want to thank everyone who submitted questions for our panelists today. We received hundreds of questions, and we will turn to some of those in the second half of the conversation. And with that, I am excited now to hand it over to Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, who is the Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child and a practicing pediatrician in the community outside of Boston. Lindsey, I will pass it over to you to introduce our panelists and get the conversation started. 

Lindsey Burghardt: Thanks, Rebecca. And thanks to everybody who took time out of their day to join us here. And before I introduce our fantastic panelists, I’m just going to start by giving some context and some background for our conversation, and then we’ll jump right in. And I think we’ll have a great conversation together today. So earlier this year, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child published their 16th working paper and they called it Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundation of Healthy Development. And that working paper laid out a framework for how the child-caregiver relationship is critically important and just as important as it’s ever been. But in shaping early childhood development. But that relationship doesn’t exist in isolation. And the places where people live affect what they’re exposed to. And that in turn affects maturing biological systems. And those effects can be positive or they can be negative. And that’s what we mean when we say that Place Matters. So the physical environment that surrounds children, their built environment, their natural environment. Both of those are shaped by human actions, including very intentional decisions around policies that shape the environments where kids live and the quality and the conditions in the environment where children live. They’re not evenly or randomly distributed. They’re shaped by and they’re deeply rooted in public policies and social history that we’ll talk about today. So for many families, both these historical roots, as well as present day policies and decisions being made, are resulting in really an uneven distribution of risk and opportunity in neighborhoods and in the places where families are raising young children. So I am thrilled just completely thrilled to introduce two really special guests who are going to talk more about this today and who are really deeply committed to reshaping children’s environments to support their healthy development. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a fellow pediatrician. She’s an activist and author. Just an amazing person who leads an innovative program called Rx Kids, which aims to address child poverty and health equity. And it does it through unconditional direct cash payments to residents of Flint, Michigan, during pregnancy and throughout the first year of their child’s life. Our other panelists, Dr. Luke Schafer. among many things, is the Hermann Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and the inaugural Director of Poverty Solutions. And he’s partnering with Mona to launch Rx Kids. Luke has a new book that came out this summer, The Injustice of Place, and it provides what I think is a really sweeping understanding of extreme poverty in the United States. And it puts a new lens on poverty, I think, because of the unique multidimensional measures, Luke, that you used in the book, as well as the way that you engage the communities when you are conducting research for the book. So Mona and Luke, welcome. I’m really excited to have you here.

Mona Hanna-Attisha: Thank you so much for having us. 

Lindsey Burghardt: So the two of you are working in really close collaboration with the community in Flint to address poverty in really actionable ways. And what I’m hoping today and what we talked about before when we prepared for this webinar was really focusing on the innovative approach to solutions that you guys have taken and so that those who are listening can apply anything that resonates in their own contexts. Sound good? Awesome. All right, let’s do it. So first question for Mona. We have some international listeners and some who may not be as familiar with maybe how your really specific engagement in this area got kicked off and your work related to the Flint water crisis and you really helped to shine a spotlight on a key example of how community disadvantage and underinvestment influence exposures that s

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.

S...

In April, we hosted a webinar about the recently released IDEAS Impact Framework Toolkit—a free online resource designed to help innovators in the field of early childhood build improved programs and products that are positioned to achieve greater impact in their communities. During the webinar, we provided an overview of the site and had the opportunity to hear from two organizations in the field about how they leveraged the toolkit and its resources to shape their work: Valley Settlement and Raising a Reader. This episode of the Brain Architects podcast features highlights from the webinar. If you’re interested in hearing a full walk through of the toolkit by the Director of our Pediatric Innovation Initiative, Dr. Melanie Berry, please head over to our YouTube channel to view the full webinar recording.

• IDEAS Framework Toolkit

Corey Zimmerman: Welcome to the Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Corey Zimmerman, the Center’s Chief Program 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.

With that goal in mind, the Center recently released the IDEAS Impact Framework Toolkit—a free online resource designed to help innovators in the field of early childhood build improved programs and products that are positioned to achieve greater impact in their communities. The Toolkit is self-guided, self-paced, and provides a structured and flexible approach that facilitates program development, evaluation, and fast-cycle iteration, including resources to help teams develop and investigate a clear and precise Theory of Change.

In April, we hosted a webinar about the toolkit, where we provided an overview of the site and had the opportunity to hear from teams at several organizations in the field about how they leveraged the toolkit and its resources to shape their work. We’re excited to share those discussions with you here on this episode of the Brain Architects podcast. If you’re interested in hearing a full walk through of the toolkit, by the Director of our Pediatric Innovation Initiative, Dr. Melanie Berry, please head over to our YouTube channel to view the full webinar recording. You’ll also hear from Dr. Melanie Berry during the Q&A portion.

The full IDEAS toolkit we’ll be talking about today can be found at ideas.developingchild.harvard.edu. And now, without further ado, here’s Dr. Aeshna Badruzzaman, the Center’s Senior Project Manager for Instructional Design and the moderator for our panel discussion.

Aeshna Badruzzaman: Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is Dr. Aeshna Badruzzaman. I am a Senior Project Manager for Instructional Design at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University or HCDC, and I’m part of the development team of the IDEAS Impact Framework Toolkit. And today, I’ll be your host. So, you may hear me come off mute, and help guide presenters, and I’ll be facilitating our question and answer period. So, we are so pleased to be talking to you today about this resource. The IDEAS Impact Framework was born out of more than a decade of the Frontiers of Innovation Initiative or FOI. And some of you may have been partners in that effort. So, while our team no longer offers live training on the framework, we are so excited to be introducing it to you as a free open access resource. And we really hope that this format is going to help make IDEAS accessible to innovators in the field of early childhood development moving forward. The framework was developed in partnership with the University of Washington College of Education, and the University of Oregon Center for Translational Neuroscience. With support from the Gates Foundation, The Lego Foundation, Porticus and the Hemera Foundation. I encourage you to check out our history and acknowledgments page of the toolkit for more information about our various collaborations and supporters throughout time as well.

Now I’ll go ahead and introduce our first set of speakers from folks at Valley Settlement. We have with us Karla Reyes, who is the program manager of the El Busesito mobile preschool program at Valley Settlement, which is a nonprofit that works to create opportunities for the Latino community in the Aspen to Parachute region of Colorado. Karla joined Valley Settlement in March 2015, as a preschool teacher for El Busesito until June 2021 when she took on a leadership role. And we also have Sally Boughton who is the Director of Development and Communications at Valley Settlement, a nonprofit again, serving the rural Aspen to Parachute region Colorado with six to generation programs designed by and for local Latina immigrant families. And Sally has been with Valley Settlement for over five years and began managing the organization’s evaluation function in 2021. Thank you so much Karla and Sally look forward to hearing from you.

Karla Reyes: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting us to share our work with you all and how we have used the framework. I’m going to talk a little bit about it, we’ll see the program and how I kind of started. The idea that it will succeed though began in 2011. We had two bilingual and bicultural community organizers, who met one on one with about 300 families from the Aspen to Parachute region of Colorado. And they learned about their lives and the barriers that they faced within our community. One of the findings from the initial listening tour was that only 1% of Latino children in our community were enrolled in preschool. We also learned that three of the biggest barriers for families to participate in preschool programs were language, cost and transportation resulting in lack of access. Now we have all this information. And we started thinking creatively of different ways that we could bring more access to preschool education to our community. I have also seen those one of the first two generation programs that we launched in Valley Settlement to address the needs of preschool education. And throughout the years Valley Settlement has continued to learn, evolve and co-design programming to respond to community needs. Now, our program has four mobile preschool buses that have been retrofitted into small preschool classrooms. We have two teachers on the bus, and we serve eight children at a time, we provide families with about five to 10 hours of free preschool education. We have about 96 children that we serve annually between 40 to 50 children graduating at the end of the school year and moving on to kindergarten. And currently right now we serve different five different neighborhoods within our community. And we strive to build close relationships with families. So, our program really is designed to meet families at where they are, are at and start breaking down those barriers. We host family nights; we have home visits with our families. We have parent teacher conferences; we have different ways that families can volunteer within our program. We provide a lot of materials for families to use that home so that they can do home activities and homework packets with their students. And we really try to engage with the families. So, each one of our teachers speak Spanish, is bilingual and bicultural. So, this really allows that bond and that relationship to build with each one of our families. I’m going to hand it off to Sally Boughton, and she’s going to talk a little bit ...

These days, resilience is needed more than ever, and one simple, underrecognized way of supporting healthy and resilient child development is as old as humanity itself: play. Far from frivolous, play contributes to sturdy brain architecture, the foundations of lifelong health, and the building blocks of resilience, yet its importance is often overlooked. In this podcast, Dr. Jack Shonkoff explains the role of play in supporting resilience and five experts share their ideas and personal stories about applying the science of play in homes, communities, and crisis environments around the world.

• Video: Play in Early Childhood: The Role of Play in Any Setting

• Learning to Cope through Play

• 5 Takeaways from Supporting Refugee Parents to Help Children Learn and Thrive During Covid-19

• The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children

Sally Pfitzer, host: Welcome to the Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host, Sally Pfitzer. Our Center believes that advances in science can provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and families. We want to help you apply the science of early childhood development to your everyday interactions with children and take what you’re hearing from our experts and panels and apply it to your everyday work.

So in today’s episode, we’re going to get serious about the topic of play. For children, play is a fundamental building block of child development, but its role in supporting resilience is often overlooked. And after the past few years, we surely need resilience now more than ever! For me, as a former preschool teacher, I’m especially excited about this episode and speaking with today’s experts, because I’ve seen first-hand how important play is for young children’s development. But what can science tell us about it? And what can be done to support more play in everyday life, even in crisis contexts? In this podcast, we’ll dive into the science of play and resilience, and then we’ll explore how people are using that knowledge to support child development around the world. To explain the science, we’ll start with Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Professor of Child Health and Development and the Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. So Jack, what do we mean by resilience and what do we know about how people develop it?

Jack Shonkoff: What we mean by resilience is that we’re talking about the ability to do well, the ability to cope, the ability to overcome hardship, or adversity, or threat to your well-being. So the key about resilience is it doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

Resilience is something that you actively build, and you build it in the context of relationships in an environment that helps you learn how to cope with challenges, cope with stress, cope with hardships. And it starts very early. It starts in infancy. And infants need to have some sense of participation in that.

But also, you don’t do it totally on your own. You need the support and the security, when you’re a baby, of adults who basically help provide a manageable environment in which you can learn resilience. So, if stresses and threats are overwhelming, they can overwhelm the system. And you don’t really get a chance to build resilience. If every time something happens that challenges you, somebody jumps in to protect you, that’s not good for you either because you have to build that yourself.

So the environment has a lot to do with how you develop resilience and skills, but so does your own activity on the environment, your own sense of being a player rather than just a receiver.

But no two children are the same, even children in the same family, growing up in the same environment. From birth, children differ in how adaptable they are. If you go into a newborn nursery in a hospital, the nurses who work there can tell you about how those babies are all different from each other. Some kids are just more easygoing, constitutionally. Some kids roll with the flow, a little bit easier than others. So in a sense, we don’t all start off with the same way of reacting to stress or hardship.

Sally: That’s great. And thinking about how resilience is built, are there specific building blocks that you need to think about? In this case, could you talk a little bit more about how play might support those building blocks?

Jack: Play, by definition, is an interactive process or a kind of self-directed process. It’s not by chance that all children, regardless of where they live in the history of the species, use play as a way to develop skills. It’s the way children learn to master their environment. And they learn to try things out. They test things. They test limits. It’s driven by curiosity, and it’s driven by an inborn drive to master the environment.

And if you think about what resilience is all about, resilience is mastering your environment. It’s building the skills to be able to cope, building the skills to have strategies, to deal with your own reactions, be able to have some control over what’s going on around you. And none of that would develop as well as it does if you depended on just being taught how to be resilient. No. Your ability, your natural ability to play, is one of the most important strategies that we have developmentally to build resilience in the face of adversity.

Sally: So, what is the science that underlines this connection between healthy development and how play supports it?

Jack: God, there are mountains of science that help us to understand the process of development. And three princ...

The devastating toll of the pandemic has underscored the critical importance of connecting what science is telling us to the lived experiences of people and communities. In March of 2020, we recorded episodes exploring the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on child development. Now, a year later, we wanted to continue these conversations and discuss what we’ve learned, what needs to change, and where we go from here.

In the final episode in this special series, host Sally Pfitzer speaks with Dr. Nancy Rotter, a pediatric psychologist and the Director of Psychology in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Ambulatory Care Division at Massachusetts General Hospital. They discuss how the pandemic changed conversations around mental health, why we need to integrate mental health into the context of overall health, and what caregivers can do to help children prepare for the lessening of restrictions and the return to school.

Subscribe below via your podcast platform of choice to receive all new episodes as soon as they’re released.

• The Brain Architects Podcast: COVID-19 Special Edition: Mental Health in a Locked-Down World

• Interim Guidance on Supporting the Emotional and Behavioral Health Needs of Children, Adolescents and Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sally: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host Sally Pfitzer. In March of 2020, we recorded episodes exploring the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on child development. You may remember we discussed the importance of self-care for caregivers, and the importance of physical distancing, not social distancing.  And now a year later, we wanted to continue those conversations and discuss what we’ve learned, what needs to change, and where we go from here.

Joining us on today’s podcast, we have Dr. Nancy Rotter. She’s a pediatric psychologist and the Director of Psychology in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Ambulatory Care Division, at Mass General Hospital. Thanks so much for being with us today, Nancy.

Dr. Rotter: Thanks for having me, Sally.

Sally: So, the pandemic has made conversations about mental health more common and perhaps even less stigmatized. How do we make sure that this perspective and these conversations continue even as vaccines become available and restrictions are lessened?

Dr. Rotter: You know, I agree that there has been some shifting over time in terms of awareness and acknowledgement about mental health and specifically children’s mental health. I think the pandemic has really raised these conversations to a higher level. I think that there’s certainly been comfort in talking about heightened distress that people have experienced due to the pandemic secondary to the many stressors that families have experienced. I think about things like loss of typical childcare support, like daycare, in-person school, or even grandparents caring for children, unemployment or shifts to having to work at home, social isolation. And I think all of these things are widely understood as contributing to how people are coping and to mental health. I think sometimes people find it easier to describe experiences of anxiety and depression in the context of stress and the stress perhaps experienced by the pandemic. You might not hear those words as much. You might hear things that sound less stigmatizing—that people might talk a lot about stress or isolation or fatigue, rather than referring to specific mental health conditions themselves.

I do think that it might be a good direction to go in to think about how we can acknowledge mental health conditions as an aspect of overall health so that we can increasingly talk about things like depression or anxiety or substance use disorders in the same way that we speak about diabetes or heart disease. Shifting towards a more specific and accurate language for mental health conditions can really make a difference. because I think if we do so we can really add clarity for diagnoses, which then result in leading to more effective evidence-based treatments to treat these illnesses. Again, thinking about these like we do other health conditions.

I think the continued progress, to kind of get to the other part of your question, towards the de-stigmatization of mental health conditions will really require increased and ongoing discussions about emotional health, and to have this happen in schools, in the media, within families, and certainly when children go to see their pediatrician. I think that pediatricians more and more are providing mental health screenings at routine exams, asking developmentally based questions to both parents and children or adolescents to screen for things that are concerning—anxiety, depression, suicidality, substance use disorders. And I kind of like the idea of thinking of that type of screening as mental health vital signs. And for me, that fits with the concept that when you go to your pediatrician or you go to your doctor, there’s always vital signs. They take your heart rate and your blood pressure, and it seems to me that using that kind of language really is helpful and is something that’s understandable to everyone and can help to really de-stigmatize the concept of mental health. And I do hope that we continue to work in the direction of integration of mental health into the context of overall health.

Sally:  Yeah, absolutely. So many important points, and I especially love that idea of the vital signs. Nancy, from your perspective, has the pandemic exposed any weaknesses in our mental health care systems, particularly for young children? And how should we take those into consideration as we move forward?

Dr. Rotter: I would describe the primary challenges in our mental health care system for young children as twofold. The first relates to access to mental health care and the second is for increased need for prevention and early intervention services. While thinking about the importance of mental health care for children, I think it’s really important to be ...

The devastating toll of the pandemic has underscored the critical importance of connecting what science is telling us to the lived experiences of people and communities. In March of 2020, we recorded episodes exploring the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on child development. Now, a year later, we wanted to continue these conversations and discuss what we’ve learned, what needs to change, and where we go from here.

In the third episode in this 4-part special series, host Sally Pfitzer speaks with Dr. Renée Boynton-Jarrett, the founding Director of Vital Village Networks at Boston Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. They discuss the cost of failing to address structural inequities with sustainable and comprehensive policy changes, the vital role community leaders played during the pandemic, and why health care systems need to demonstrate trustworthiness.

The next and final episode of this special podcast series will focus on the pandemic’s impact on the mental health system.

Subscribe below via your podcast platform of choice to receive all new episodes as soon as they’re released.

• Vital Village Networks

Sally: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m your host Sally Pfitzer. In March of 2020, we recorded episodes exploring the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on child development. You may remember we discussed the importance of self-care for caregivers, and the importance of physical distancing, not social distancing.  And now a year later, we wanted to continue those conversations and discuss what we’ve learned, what needs to change, and where we go from here.

On today’s podcast, we have Dr. Renée Boynton-Jarrett, who is the founding Director of Vital Village Networks at Boston Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. So good to have you with us, Renée.

Dr. Boynton-Jarrett: Delighted to be here. Thank you, Sally.

Sally: Renée, in March of 2020, we spoke with Dr. David Williams, who explained that many of the disparities that we saw in the early stages of the pandemic were predictable and the result of longstanding social policies and systemic racism. From your perspective, as an expert in the field, in the past year, what have we learned about these disparities?

Dr. Boynton-Jarrett: I think what Dr. Williams shared is absolutely correct. What we saw happen with the COVID-19 pandemic is it took advantage of the existing inequities and just widened those. So actually, our existing structural racism created a broader opportunity for the pandemic to disparately impact the lives, the well-being, and the health of communities of color and communities that are disproportionately impacted by structural racism. And so, I think one of the things that we have learned or relearned is the tremendous cost of failing to truly address structural inequities with sustainable and comprehensive policy changes.

And as importantly, because we know structural racism is around these interconnected systems and institutions, but there are also these ideologies, mindsets, ways of thinking and being. And if we think about it, those ideologies and mindsets about who’s okay just to remain at risk, to not have the luxury of physical distancing, to not have the luxury of having water to wash hands and do the hygienic practices. We’ve learned that we also have mindsets that truly impact the way in which we view humanity and human dignity and human rights, and that this pandemic has completely taken advantage of the ways in which those mindsets, ideologies, and systems create structures of inequities.

Sally: Could you give us some examples of what changes you think need to happen in the field, particularly how communities and neighborhoods could help?

Dr. Boynton-Jarrett: Yeah. I think your question actually hits on where I see the biggest opportunity for change. So, one of the things we saw happen over and over during the pandemic is in the absence of plans. Strategic plans and responses are being created in real time, and often those decisions—whether they were decisions being made about how vaccines would roll out, whether they were decisions being made about what economic supports and resources will come to families, or what will happen with early care and education, childcare, school—we saw time and time again decisions being made that were not being made with true engagement. Not just engagement of communities, but engagement of community leadership. So really, in partnership with, in conversation with. Those who were closest to the inequities—experiencing them most directly—were not being engaged or brought to the table.

And time and time again, we also saw that the ideas, the wisdom, the strategies that were actually happening within communities were thoughtful, were creative, were real-time responsive. And actually, when we begin to get behind them, we see more protection happening for communities. So, we also saw tremendous community leadership, and in the absence of that leadership, I think that we would have all fared much worse in this pandemic.

Sally: Just anecdotally, I’ve seen that even in some of the work we’ve done at the Center too, and often finding that bringing in members of the community actively from the beginning of projects has been the thing that has made those projects so much more successful. Could you tell us more about your work at Vital Village Networks?

Dr. Boynton-Jarrett: So, Vital Village Networks is based at Boston Medical Center. We promote child well-being and address structural and systemic inequities and systems of care and education in early childhood by doing a couple of things. We really work around establishing sustainable, authentic, and equitable partnerships between caregivers, parents, and community residents and community-based organizations and cross sector institutions—health care, education, advocacy, social service. In this work, we all really focus on expanding leadership trajectories and pathways for community leaders, and that can be through trainings and certifications and expanded opportunities. But we also really think about how do we work to build capacity and enhance existing community-driven solutions? So, how do we build capacity within a community to promote well-being? And often, that involves helping institutions and organizations within the community work with community leaders in a different way and we use a model called co-design. So, how do we create and design things together?

We really work to think about what builds equitable partnerships. What creates a table for truly equitable participation? A lot of approaches to community engagement and community work begin with the deficit lens. They begin with the idea that there’s a problem in the community, and we ...