How Early Childhood Experiences Affect Lifelong Health and Learning.

Abby
7 Aug, 2024
 The early childhood brain development story has been a powerful influence on the growth of investments in programs, to promote early learning and enhance school readiness. But the brain does not exist by itself, it connects itself to the rest of the body and is critically important because early childhood experiences are as much as lifelong physical and mental health as they are about early learning and readiness to succeed in school.

How Early Childhood Experiences Affect Lifelong Health and Learning.

Early Childhood Experiences all biological systems and all of them are highly interconnected. All of these systems are primed to adapt to whatever environment they throw at us. Think about this as a team of highly skilled athletes, each has a role to play but they depend upon each other, and they influence each other's responses like any good team. It's how they operate together that is the key to their success.

    The Brain stresses every cell in the body is working overtime. The brain is the master control system that detects threats and then manages the response of all of the different systems. It sends signals to the cardiovascular system to increase heart rate and blood pressure signals are picked up by metabolic systems to increase the availability of blood sugar. To provide more energy stores for the body, the immune system is activated to be on alert for the possibility of a wound or the need to protect against infection. 

The neuroendocrine system is activated to increase levels of stress hormones in the stress bloodstream. All of these also provide feedback to the brain. The stress response system was designed, to deal with an acute threat or challenge but when the stress continues at a very high level then these biological responses actually start to have a wear and tear effect on the body. 

This is where stress explains chronic disease. The science is really clear, the most costly chronic diseases in our society have their roots in early childhood cardiovascular disease, diabetes and depression. Three of many diseases that are associated with greater adversity early in life.

 Those three diseases together consume more than 600 billion dollars of health care costs a year. So, if we want to think about preventing disease and promoting health it doesn't begin with exercising more and eating better when you're 30 or 40 years old. Health promotion and preventing disease begins prenatally and it extends into the early childhood period.

Early Learning, connecting the brain to the rest of the body has very important implications for early childhood policy. If we look at the basic science-based principles focused on early learning, strengthening relationships building skills, and reducing sources of stress, those are the same principles that increase the likelihood of lifelong physical and mental health.   

Sources of Adversity                   

When we think about the major sources of adversity early in life, we talk about poverty discrimination, exposure to violence, maltreatment, child abuse, and neglect. Although each of these sources of adversity differ from each other biologically. 

The effect on the body is the same systemic racism, the dangers of implicit bias and everyday discrimination, impose a level of stress and adversity on families of color, raising children that is present all the time. It's never too late to make things better and we are biologically prepared to adapt to whatever environment we live in but, we need to look upstream.

How Early Childhood Experiences Affect Lifelong Health and Learning.

Systemic Issues 

Systemic issues are the sources of these enormous burdens of threat and hardship. We have to connect policies and resource allocations from the educational sector, the health sector, and the human services sector. Paediatrics primary care is the one domain.

Paediatric Primary Care                         

Where almost all children are seen from birth on and this provides a critical opportunity for engagement with families and developing relationships promoting healthy development and is the ideal frontline opportunity to connect families to needed services as early as possible when they can be most effective in paediatrics alone.

Early childhood care is not going to provide all of the support that many families need. The opportunity is to move away from asking how we connect pediatric primary care, to early childhood programs and in a different way, change our mindset to say how do we build a new early childhood ecosystem in which pediatrics is an integrated part. 

The brain development story has been a powerful influence, the same principles, the same concepts are also affecting the early foundations of physical and mental health that will last for a lifetime.

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