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Promoting the healthy development of children

Photo by Lisa Hancock Conference organizers and members of the ICECS steering committee, from left: Frank Oberklaid (Australia); Naomi Eisenstadt (Britain); Jane Bertrand (Canada); and Neal Halfon (United States).

BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer

It’s a disturbing reality that although the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia are the world’s top English-speaking democracies, they lag behind a number of Western nations — Scandinavian ones in particular — in a key area: early childhood development and the array of educational, health and other systems that support it.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, most child-care centers in the United States are rated poor to mediocre in quality — only slightly less than half meet minimal standards — even though 60% to 70% of children under 6 years of age are regularly placed in some type of out-of-home child-care facility or early childhood program.

It was against this grim background that the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities hosted the second International Collaborative on Early Childhood Systems (ICECS) at the Luxe Summit Hotel in Los Angeles this past June — just one of several early childhood development initiatives the center has pioneered. The three-day event, first held in 2002, enabled 55 cross-disciplinary experts from the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia to share information aimed at accelerating change and improving the capacity of each nation to build more effective early childhood service systems.

The four nations share a common tradition of what is known as “Elizabethan poor laws” dating back to 16th-century England. This common legacy continues to guide public policy regarding child development by largely extending public support to children from families that fail their child-rearing obligations, thereby placing the entire burden of raising better-off children almost solely on their parents.

“All these countries have health care and early education services, but some kids get these services and some don’t,” explained Neal Halfon, the center’s director, who is also professor of pediatrics, public health and public policy. “If we’re going to deal with the profound inequalities that begin in early childhood, we have to level the playing field — and each one of these countries is saying, ‘How can we best do that?’ ”

Photos by Reed Hutchinson Children at the Hope Street Family Center, a multi-service facility for low-income families in inner-city Los Angeles.

One groundbreaking initiative, launched over the four years between the inaugural ICECS meeting and the current one, was the development in Canada of the “Early Development Inventory” (EDI), a questionnaire with 103 items that enables kindergarten teachers to assess a child’s early development and school readiness.

The EDI was so successfully implemented in parts of Canada that the Australian attendees at the first ICECS collaborative helped to get it up and running across Australia. “They didn’t have to spend six years developing the program,” said Halfon. “Instead, after a few adaptations, they leapfrogged from the R&D process to direct application in two years.”

Another key resource shared at the meeting was the “Promoting Healthy Development Survey” (PHDS). Developed under the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, it measures the quality of early childhood health services provided a given family’s health-care plan.

Many attendees marveled at the fact that Canada and Australia have a measure of “how children are doing and the U.S. has a way of measuring how (health) systems are performing,” said Halfon. “What became obvious to all who attended the meeting was that if we administer the EDI and PHD-s in the same communities, we can have a new measurement system that enables communities to hold themselves accountable for doing what they need to do to achieve early learning and health development outcomes.”