This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a strong and unequivocal statement entitled Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress: Partnering with Families and Communities to Promote Relational Health, that urges the field of pediatrics to commit to early relational health.[i] The National Early Relational Health (ERH) Coordinating Hub at the Center for the Study of
HOPE centers the experiences of the child. This approach adds to the family focus of the Strengthening Families Protective Factors approach, and the policy and norms perspective of the CDC’s Essentials for Childhood program. These two approaches, both grounded in the prevention of child maltreatment, have been widely adopted – Strengthening Families in the child welfare system, and Essentials
Science tells us that relationships are foundational to the health and well-being of young children—in fact to children and youth of all ages—and their caregivers. Why, then, shouldn’t they be central to how we think about early childhood health and systems? This is the question that our early relational health (ERH) initiative seeks to answer.