Getting to Know Your International Contacts

1.    The multimedia video , Building Adult Capabilities to Improve Child Outcomes: A Theory of Change describes the need to focus on building the capabilities of caregivers and strengthening the communities that together form the environment of relationships essential to children's lifelong learning, health, and behavior. It goes on to say that  What children need is entire environment of relationship to be invested in their overall healthy growth. It starts will building active skills in adults and when this is done, we find that Building adult capacities and improve children outcomes. With out this strong foundation children will fall behind

2.    InBrief: Executive Function: Skills for Life and Learning, Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive functioning, a group of skills that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, and revise plans as necessary. This edition of the InBrief series explains how these lifelong skills develop, what can disrupt their development, and how supporting them pays off in school and life. Acquiring the early building blocks of these skills is one of the most important and challenging tasks of the early childhood years, and having the right support and experiences through middle childhood, adolescence, and into early adult life is essential for the successful development of these capacities.

 

3.    The full range of abilities continues to grow and mature through the teen years and into early adulthood. To ensure that children develop these capacities, it’s helpful to understand how the quality of the interactions and experiences that our communities provide for them either strengthens or undermines these emerging skills. They are as follows:

1. When children have had opportunities to develop executive function and self-regulation skills successfully, both individuals and society experience lifelong benefits.

2. The critical factors in developing a strong foundation for these essential skills are chil­dren’s relationships, the activities they have oppor­tunities to engage in, and the places in which they live, learn, and play.

3. If children do not get what they need from their relationships with adults and the conditions in their environments or worse if those influences are sources of toxic stress, their skill development can be seriously delayed or impaired.

Harvard university center on developing child offers several activities. One of the programs offered is student education and leadership development: Learning opportunities.

The Center’s Education and Leadership Development (ELD) agenda is a full suite of formal and informal opportunities committed to enhancing the growth of the next generation during the critical early stages of their intellectual development. We are also focused on building the capacity of career professionals to translate research into policy and action. As such, we engage both current and future leaders in constructive dialogue to expose them to new paradigms and theories in order to guide their understanding of how to leverage this new knowledge on behalf of vulnerable children and their families.

Student Seminar Series

The Center on the Developing Child’s Student Seminar Series is designed to foster interdisciplinary conversations among Harvard undergraduates and graduate students who are interested in promoting the healthy development of young children in the United States and abroad. Led by a doctoral student facilitator, the yearlong, non-credit Student Seminar Series will focus on a variety of topics and employs various formats, including conversations with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers and discussion of current events.