A new brief explains how important it is to integrate comprehensive “whole child-whole family” approaches into early childhood programs, and it shares the latest insights about how to integrate comprehensive supports more effectively.
“America’s young children and families are facing historic challenges and possibilities,” the brief — “Strengthening Whole Family Comprehensive Supports in Early Childhood Implications for Head Start and Early Head Start” — explains.
“Families are confronting long-standing barriers to opportunity like poverty, systemic racism, and under-resourced neighborhoods, and also challenges related to a global pandemic, gun violence, and climate change including increasingly dangerous natural disasters and resulting displacements.”
However, families are “resilient, resourceful, and motivated to provide their children with a promising future. They are ready to tap into this era of unprecedented possibility, scientific discovery, and innovation that can buffer the impacts of adverse experiences.”
The brief was written by Joan Wasser Gish of Boston College’s Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children; Rachel Chazan-Cohen of the University of Connecticut’s Applied Research on Children Lab; and Tassy Warren of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.
“All families need support during these early years,” Chazan-Cohen has said about the importance of supporting families. “When children are young, parenting is joyful and wonderful, but it’s also hard. If we can support parents and families to understand child development and support child development starting right at the start, it just is such a boon to children.”
Warren adds:
“We know that for all of us what surrounds us is what shapes us, and this is particularly true for the youngest children who are in such a sensitive period of development. The more we can focus on supporting the whole child, and the environments where they spend time — including with their families, in early care and education settings and in their communities — the more we can increase the likelihood of healthy development.”
And as the brief says, “Research demonstrates that: caring relationships, access to basic resources, access to opportunities, and safe and predictable early environments can buffer children and their families against the adverse consequences of toxic stress and boost healthy development and learning.
“One effective way to promote healthy child development and learning is by integrating early childhood education and comprehensive family supports.”
Providing an overview, Wasser Gish notes, “Many early childhood programs are doing wonderful work to support the whole child and to provide comprehensive supports and opportunities to young children and their families. We are learning that using best practices to be intentional in organizing and executing that work can significantly improve outcomes.”
The lessons learned from best practices, the brief explains, “point toward establishing a clear operational infrastructure to support in-program interventions as well as coordination of community-based services, enrichments, and relationships for children and families.”
The most well-known early childhood programs that incorporate comprehensive services for children and families are the federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs.
Drawing on research related to these programs, as well as approaches to integrating comprehensive supports for elementary school-aged children, the brief makes policy recommendations for strengthening the Head Start and Early Head Start programs.
These include:
- updating the Head Start Act to better reflect recent research and best practices for effective coordination of comprehensive services
- increasing funding for these programs, and
- providing more support for the professionals who work with families
As the brief concludes, “Best practices build on what Head Start and Early Head Start are already doing by creating a systematic and methodological approach to ensuring that every child and family receives needed supports and aligned opportunities.”
It’s a systemic approach that “allows for adaptability as children’s needs and families’ circumstances change.”
“Strengthening these programs by focusing on improved coordination and integration of comprehensive supports and opportunities will allow Early Head Start and Head Start programs to promote healthy child development, learning, and thriving in an era of change and challenge.”
To learn more, please read the brief.
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