title: Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development.
abstract: The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a historic opportunity to implement interventions, at scale, to promote early childhood development. Although the evidence base for the importance of early childhood development has grown, the research is distributed across sectors, populations, and settings, with diversity noted in both scope and focus. We provide a comprehensive updated analysis of early childhood development interventions across the five sectors of health, nutrition, education, child protection, and social protection. Our review concludes that to make interventions successful, smart, and sustainable, they need to be implemented as multi-sectoral intervention packages anchored in nurturing care. The recommendations emphasise that intervention packages should be applied at developmentally appropriate times during the life course, target multiple risks, and build on existing delivery platforms for feasibility of scale-up. While interventions will continue to improve with the growth of developmental science, the evidence now strongly suggests that parents, caregivers, and families need to be supported in providing nurturing care and protection in order for young children to achieve their developmental potential.
authors.affiliation: UNICEF, 3 UN Plaza, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: pbritto@unicef.org.
authors.forename: Pia R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Britto
authors.affiliation: Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development, University of Toronto, ON, Canada; Departments of Physiology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Medicine, University of Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Stephen J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Lye
authors.affiliation: Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development, University of Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Kerrie
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Proulx
authors.affiliation: Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Aisha K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Yousafzai
authors.affiliation: Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development, University of Toronto, ON, Canada; Departments of Physiology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Medicine, University of Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Stephen G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Matthews
authors.affiliation: Center for Global Child Health, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Tyler
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Vaivada
authors.affiliation: Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health, Yale University, CT, USA.
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Perez-Escamilla
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Nirmala
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.affiliation: Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ip
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Lia C H
authors.initials: LCH
authors.lastname: Fernald
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, and Department of Pediatrics, Offord Centre for Child Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Harriet
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: MacMillan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Developmental Sciences and NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton, UK.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hanson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Theodore D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Wachs
authors.affiliation: Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Haogen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.affiliation: New York University Steinhardt, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Hirokazu
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yoshikawa
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Missouri, St Louis, MO, USA.
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cerezo
authors.affiliation: Yale Child Study Centre, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, CT, USA.
authors.forename: James F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Leckman
authors.affiliation: Center of Excellence in Women and Child Health, The Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan; Center for Global Child Health, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Zulfiqar A
authors.initials: ZA
authors.lastname: Bhutta
mesh_terms: D017028:Caregivers; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D010290:Parents; D011640:Public Policy; D012919:Social Behavior