In December 2023, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our second installment: “Understanding Racism’s Impact on Child Development: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” During the webinar, Stephanie Curenton, PhD, Nathaniel Harnett, PhD, Mavis Sanders, PhD, and Natalie Slopen, ScD, discussed their latest research, exploring how racism gets “under the skin” to impact children’s development and how it contributes to unequal access to opportunity in the places where children live, grow, play, and learn. Together, they explored ways to dismantle systemic barriers and work toward solutions that promote healthy child development. The webinar discussion has been adapted for this episode of the Brain Architects podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Welcome to the Brain Architects, the podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at
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Harvard University.
I'm Cameron Seymour Hawkins, the Center's Communications Coordinator.
Our center believes that advances in the science of child development provide a powerful source
of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and their caregivers.
By sharing the latest science from the field, we hope to help you make that science actionable
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and apply it in your work in ways that can increase your impact.
In December, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our second installment,
Understanding Racism's Impact on Child Development, Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United
States.
During the webinar, Drs. Stephanie Currington, Nathaniel Hartnett, Maevis Sanders, and Natalie
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Slopen discussed their latest research, exploring how racism gets under the skin to impact children's
development and how it contributes to unequal access to opportunity in the places where
children live, grow, play, and learn.
Together, they explored ways to dismantle systemic barriers and worked towards solutions
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that promote healthy child development.
We're excited to share this conversation on today's episode of the Brain Architects podcast.
Now, without further ado, here's Tessie Warren, the Center's Deputy Director and Chief Strategy
Officer, who will set the stage for our conversation.
Hello.
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Welcome to today's webinar, Understanding Racism's Impact on Child Development, Working
Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.
We're so excited to bring you into this conversation.
Whether you're joining us for the first time or are regular to the Center on the Developing
Child, thank you for being here today.
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This webinar is part of our Place Matters webinar series.
The series is designed to expand upon our Center's recent work on how influences from
our environments, particularly the built and natural environments, play a role in shaping
early childhood development, beginning before birth.
Throughout this series, we're highlighting scientific and community expertise and offering
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strategies to work towards fairness of place and to create the conditions that will allow
all children to thrive.
Today's conversation will explore the intersection between policy, systemic inequalities, racial
disparities, and children's healthy development.
We hope that you'll gain insights that are helpful to you in the work you do in support
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of children and families.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions when registering for this event.
We received hundreds of submitted questions.
We'll be asking some of those questions in the second half of the conversation.
Of course, we will not have time to address all the questions that were submitted or we
would be here for days, but we were really intrigued going through all of the questions
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that were submitted and we appreciate the thought provoking ideas that you all brought
to mind for us.
So we will be thinking about how those questions can inform future conversations.
So I am really excited in just a second to hand it over to Dr. Stephanie Currenton, who
we are incredibly lucky to have leading this conversation for us today.
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Dr. Currenton is a professor in the education leadership and policy studies department at
Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and is the director
of the Center on the Ecology of Early Development or SEAD.
SEAD's research and initiatives serve to inform policies that promote equity and justice for
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racially and ethnically minoritized children in the context of education, health, and community.
She is joined today by an outstanding panel of researchers, Dr. Nathaniel Hartnett, Dr.
Navis Sanders, and Dr. Natalie Slipkin.
Dr. Hartnett is director of the Neurobiology of Effective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory
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at McLean Hospital and an assistant professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Hartnett's research is focused on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate
susceptibility to trauma and stress-related disorders.
Dr. Sanders is a senior research scholar of Black children and families at Child Trends,
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where she leads an applied research agenda that advances racial equity and social justice.
Before joining Child Trends in 2021, Dr. Sanders served as a professor of education and affiliate
professor in the doctoral program in language, literacy, and culture at the University of
Maryland Baltimore County.
Dr. Slipkin is an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan
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School of Public Health.
Dr. Slipkin is a social epidemiologist, and her research focuses on social and contextual
factors that shape childhood development and inequities in health.
Now, I'll let Dr. Currington share more about herself and kick off our conversation.
Hello, everyone, I am honored to be here to moderate this conversation and to represent
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SEAD as well as Boston University.
As Tassie was saying, our work at SEAD specifically focuses on understanding how racism impacts
Black children's growth and development and the ways in which families use their cultural
assets and social capital to protect themselves from the harm of racism.
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And we know that this conversation we're having today is critically important because racism
operates on multiple levels and it impacts young children throughout all levels of their
biology, their social development, and other ecological systems.
And in the prenatal phase and the first years of life, they are the most sensitive developmental
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period.
So it's really critical to understand how racism exerts its impact on the health and
growth of prenatal children and infants and toddlers.
As a scholar myself, I've been investigating and doing work on the topic of racism in young
children's learning for decades.
By the fall of 2024, SEAD, along with our partners at Equity Research Action Coalition,
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will be publishing a special issue for Early Childhood Research Quarterly on this topic,
featuring researchers from a variety of disciplines and highlighting the work of several junior
scholars.
So the scientific evidence is clear and it's growing that racism imposes unique and substantial
stressors on the daily lives of families and caregivers.
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And understanding how these stressors affect child health and development provides a compelling
framework for understanding and protecting young children.
Such frameworks are the RISE 3 model for which I'm a co-author with Dr. Yoma Arruca.
It presents new ideas about how communities, policies, programs, and funding streams might
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confront and dismantle inequalities and build a stronger future for all of us.
But we're here today because there's so much opportunity ahead of us at the community level,
at the policy level, and in all the work that brings each of us to this conversation today.
As the Center on the Developing Child wrote in their Place Matters paper that was published
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earlier this year, it says, just as dimensions of the built and natural environment have
been designed over time, they can be redesigned to support healthy development.
So throughout our discussion today, we will share ways to redesign, rethink, and advance
forward in pursuit of creating environments that are anti-racist and can support all children's
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healthy development.
And with that, I'm so excited to be moderating this conversation with Nate and Natalie and
Mavis.
And I'm going to start the conversation with Nate.
So Nate, can you share what you've observed in your recent research in early childhood
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emotional health?
Specifically, how have you observed the effects of racism on children's brain development
and how are you able to expose a direct relationship to structural racism in your findings?
Yes.
Thank you so much, Dr. Curran.
Thank you very much for having me.
Just to set the stage for answering that question, my lab is really interested in understanding
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how we identify and prevent the development of things like trauma and stress related disorders.
And we know that the stress that people experience during childhood really plays a role in the
development of those disorders.
And we know that there are these really strong racial disparities between the amount of stress
that people are exposed to, where Black and other racially and ethically marginalized
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individuals are exposed to a disproportionate amount of stress.
And so what we've been trying to do is to understand how the places in which children
are growing up is related to the developments in brain structure and function and how that
might play a role in the player development of PTSD.
And so one of the more recent things that we've done is we've looked at data from this
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large scale, longitudinous study of child development called the Adolescent Brain and
Cognitive Development Study.
This is a study of about 10 to 12,000 kids that started when they were about nine to
10 years old.
And we were looking at the volume of gray matter of different brain regions that we
know are really important for emotion, learning and memory.
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This includes things like the prefrontal cortex, really important for attention and top down
regulation of people's emotional responses.
And then regions like the amygdala hippocampus, which are really important for expressing
that emotional response, that fear response to something stressful.
And what we found was that if you look at the brain volume of white children compared
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to black children, you see that black children show these decrements in gray matter volume
of these different brain regions.
But what's really important is if you look at the environments that they're growing up
in, if you look at the amount of income that black children have or their parents have,
if you look at this thing called the area deprivation index, this way of looking at
the amount of resources available in these different environments, if you look at the
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amount of conflict that's happening in the homes, there are really strong racial disparities
in all these different areas where black children are really living in these areas that have
much more deprivation.
There's much more conflict in the homes and there's much lower income across those.
And all of those things are related to gray matter volume in this study.
And so once we go through, to address your question of how do we actually expose this
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direct link, once we go through, we try to normalize these mathematically.
Once we try to account for all those, you really don't see strong racially differences
in gray matter volume anymore.
This is really important because we also look to see how are the volumes of these regions
tied to PTSD symptoms, even at nine and 10 years old.
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And so you wouldn't expect large symptoms of PTSD.
You wouldn't expect many people to reach the level of the disorder.
And you don't see that, but you really still see, even at nine and 10, differences in the
severity of PTSD symptoms, differences in the levels of trauma exposure at nine and
10 years old between white and black individuals.
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And once you sort of normalize, once you sort of equalize the environment, the places that
they're growing up in, you really see these sort of normalizations of brain volume too.
And so we're really thinking about, how do we address this question that the webinar
is about, the sort of aspect of place and how that's related to where kids are growing
up so that we can help to alleviate some of these brain differences that we see that are
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going to have a role in how these individuals develop into the future.
So this is just absolutely fascinating.
I was taking copious notes here and I can't wait until we get to the question and answer
session to talk more.
But at this point though, I want to give Natalie a chance to talk about some of her recent
work that is centered on racial disparities and the physical and mental health of young
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children.
So Natalie, can you tell us about your research and how you're finding links to inequitable
experiences and opportunities, particularly as it relates to inequalities in the places
where caregivers are raising their young children?
Yes.
Thank you so much for having me here and for the opportunity to share the work that I've
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been doing along with my students.
So my research is focused on understanding how inequitable experiences of opportunity
for healthy development that are shaped by our systems and structures affect healthy
development and contribute to inequities that we see across socioeconomic position as well
as across racial and ethnic groups with marginalized racial and ethnic children from marginalized
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groups often displaying worse outcomes early in the life course.
And we know that these differences emerge over time.
So health is rooted in childhood.
And so it's really important to understand the systems and structures that are in place
very early on affecting children and their families so that we can identify where and
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how we can intervene.
And so I have been working on research across a variety of topics, thinking about what are
different systems and structures that children interact with that are relevant to health
in the earliest years of life.
And one of the areas very relevant to today's topic is housing.
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And one of the areas that I'm interested in is also in neighborhoods.
And so I thought I could give an example of a study that I published this past year related
to neighborhoods that connects to the topic for today.
So this was a study that we published in pediatrics and we drew on a large national data source
called the mortality disparities in American communities.
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And what we did is we connected information about over a million children in the United
States coming from the American community surveys, linking it to information about the
neighborhoods that they were living in.
So here we were using a neighborhood measure called the Child Opportunity Index.
And then we followed the children were followed with death record data for 11 years.
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And so what our study found was that residing in neighborhoods with lower opportunity based
on this measure of the Child Opportunity Index was associated with increases for mortality
for children as well as for their parents.
And so we felt as though it was important to document the intergenerational consequences
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of neighborhood settings and the importance of implementing place based policies to reduce
the inequities that children experience that will have consequences as time goes on.
And so that particular study that I'm talking about was focused on outcome of mortality,
but there's a huge literature documenting the role that inequitable neighborhood environments
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have across many dimensions of social, emotional, behavioral development in children and then
health outcomes that we see as individuals age over the life course.
So that's an interesting area of work.
And one of the topics that I'm very interested in is how we best measure neighborhood context
for health.
So there's a lot of leading, you know, a lot of popular measures of neighborhood environments.
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And I think there's a lot of open questions about which is going to be most useful for
us and in which context.
So some measures may be best when we're thinking about how to decide where to implement certain
programs or policies, whereas other may be useful, you know, for research purposes.
And so I think there's a lot of open questions that we can answer using science about the
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best ways to conceptualize what the characteristics of neighborhoods matter most for children.
And then finally, another topic that I'm interested in has to do with heterogeneity or variation
in the way children respond to their environments, thinking that that can help us to understand
how to develop interventions that can close gaps in outcomes to lead to more equitable
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health and development for all children.
Well, again, just some really compelling research and just really, really, really interesting
and compelling, somewhat a little sad too.
So I will turn it over to Mavis.
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And Mavis, you and your team of researchers recently developed an interactive tool that
allows users to, such as users, such as policymakers, practitioners or researchers to browse a
decade of literature on the effects of protective community resources and with the aim to explore
how these resources can mitigate the impacts of risks faced by children and youth, including
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racism as one of those risks.
So during your review of this extensive body of work, can you share more about some of
your key discoveries?
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Stephanie.
Thank you for the invitation to this conversation.
Just to provide a bit of context, my co-authors and I, including Jennifer Winston, Shana Rochester
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and Dominique Martinez, I definitely wanted to give a shout out.
We have been engaged in a process since I arrived at Child Trends to develop a research
agenda, which we sort of collectively throughout the organization decided would acknowledge
the diversity in the black community, be strengths based, be systems focused and solutions based
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as well.
And we went through a three step process.
And I believe that there'll be a brief in the chat box to identify, we went through
this three step process to identify the research priorities.
So you can imagine it was a large option, a large number of options that we could have
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pursued.
And so what we decided through this three step process is to focus on black family cultural
assets and community protective resources.
My colleague, Krishana Lloyd, will be focused on black family cultural assets and I am focused
on protective community resources.
As part of that process, we engaged in a systematic review of protective community resources and
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how they relate to child and youth development.
We had 3000 studies initially, we were able to reduce those to about 300 and so odd studies
that went before review and then it was reduced further to 172 studies.
So the bibliographic tool that you reference includes information for those 172 studies
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that users can filter based on either the race of the participants or the age of the
participants or the type of protective community resource people are interested in.
And so for this discussion, because we're talking a lot about mental well-being, cognitive
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development and so forth, when we look at those outcomes and it's also filterable by
outcomes, things like community cohesion and support rise to the top as being consistently
significant across this very diverse body of literature.
So I want to put that out there.
It's really hard to come to draw any absolutes, but there is a preponderance of evidence that
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suggests that community role models and mentors, positive peer support, school connectedness
and engagement in community-based activities as well as neighborhood amenities all contribute
to the positive mental health of young people and that they can mitigate some of the risks
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and I think that's what Natalie was talking about, that's in communities.
And what that suggests to me is that relationships matter, but also the spaces for people together
and build those kinds of relationships that were so important to young people's development.
So I'd be happy to talk about that further as this conversation unfolds.
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Yes, I'm going to ask you another question, Mavis, about your work.
Your team released a brief in November that was called Black Children and Youth Can Benefit
from Focused Research on Protective Community Resources and in that brief you stated several
neighborhood amenities and services that were associated with that health and safety.
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Can you name some more of those specifically?
Yeah, absolutely.
When we, and then Natalie talked about this as well, the constraints that we have as researchers
by the measures that we have, right?
But we are improving in those areas.
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Neighborhood amenities specifically, which is one of the areas that we found to have
a significant and positive relationship and association with black children's flourishing
and development.
One of those, you can think of those amenities as parks, recreation centers, libraries, sidewalks.
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So people who are familiar with the National Survey of Children's Health are familiar with
that sort of neighborhood amenities measure that includes those.
There are also some studies that are really interested around walkability of a city.
So how is the sort of city laid out to promote walking as a mode of transportation?
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So you look at public transportation as how buildings are laid out, the lighting that
is available, all of those things.
And so we also published one brief where we looked at flourishing and flourishing was
just looking at individuals' ability to stick to a particular topic or a particular task
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until the end, their ability to control their emotions and those kinds of things.
And we found that young people who had access to all four of those neighborhood amenities,
sidewalks, green spaces and parks, libraries, and rec centers were more likely to flourish
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or to have those sort of mental health indicators of flourishing than children who did not have
access to those four amenities.
We also found another study suggested that young men who were in cities with walkability,
so young black male adolescents were less likely to report being involved in physical
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violence of any sort when they lived in cities or neighborhoods with higher walkability scales.
So those are just two of the sort of space-based or built environment elements that we've seen
make a difference in the outcomes that we're interested in for black children at U.
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Yeah, again, this is just so the research that all of you are talking about is just
really, really emphasizing the importance of place and the importance of relationships
within the context of spaces and places.
So it's just fascinating to me.
I'm going to circle back to Natalie now and ask you, Natalie, about the Child Opportunity
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Index and how you use that in your work.
So specifically, can you share with us more about this tool and how that tool in particular
might help us better understand health disparities in places where children live and grow?
So the Child Opportunity Index is a measurement tool that was developed by Dolores Acevedo
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Garcia and her colleagues, notably Clemens Nelopi, who is a major contributor as well.
They're based at Brandeis University.
And they developed this measure as a way to think about the opportunities that are available
to children in various communities across the United States.
So it's an example of a place-based measure that's aiming to evaluate or quantify resources
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and opportunities specifically as related to children's well-being and future prospects.
So there are other place-based composite measures of advances or disadvantages that exist.
So Nate had mentioned the Area Deprivation Index as an example.
There's the Social Vulnerability Index.
There's really a host.
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There's an Environmental Justice Index.
But this is the only one that I'm aware of that I've seen in the literature that's really
tailored and designed to think about those aspects of an environment that matter for
child development specifically.
So thinking about quality of education and health care, neighborhood characteristics
of the built environment, such as those that Mavis had just mentioned, like walkability
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and safety, and other essential elements of neighborhoods and communities.
And so this measure is used by many different types of individuals and organizations.
It's very well designed to highlight disparities in access to opportunities across different
demographic groups and across geographic areas.
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So this can help people to think about which contexts really require certain types of
investments or interventions, and where we may see the greatest impacts of investments
for improving outcomes among perhaps underserved communities.
And so the data is, you know, we have this data nationally across the United States,
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and it's been being used by researchers as well as a lot of different public health departments
at this time.
Great, great.
So happy to learn too that that was built here in Massachusetts.
That's very great.
I'm going to switch to talking about the implications for you all's work, and I'm going to open
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it up to each of you.
So I know that it's hard for researchers to come up with policy recommendations or community
strategies specifically, because we are scientists and researchers by training.
But can you think about your research and how it informs strategies to support child
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development at either that community level or that larger systems level?
And I'm going to circle back to Nate and let him start.
You chose the one that it's hard to answer.
So I think that, you know, for us in the brain imaging field, it's sometimes hard to think
about how does showing pictures of the brain to people really help with this type of thing
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and how do we address policy?
But I think that one of the benefits of the work that we do is that we really can show
these effects very strongly.
It's one thing when you ask people, you know, do you think that discrimination has an impact
on well-being?
And you can get in this argument of, oh, is it perceived?
Is it this thing?
But we can actually look at the brain.
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We can actually look at what happens.
When you keep people in these impoverished environments, I think that's really powerful.
We've done a bit in terms of reaching out both to talking with individuals at the Center
for Law, Brain, Behavior with Francis Shen and thinking about how do we actually talk
to people in positions of power, people who are making laws, people who are making policy
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and actually showing them the data to just say, look, this is a real thing.
We can really see it in the people that we're looking at.
It's not something you can really get away from.
You know, and I think that there are other things that we've thought about in terms of,
you know, what are the actual policies that we can do?
But I think, you know, one thing that I've said in the past is like, well, we know that
even though there's heterogeneity in the results, even things like cash transfers are associated
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with changes in the brain.
They're very reliably in some ways associated with changes in mental health and behavior.
And I think that part of the reason you see these heterogeneities in some of the findings
is for the exact reason that we're talking about here, right, and that the place that
people are growing up and the actual structures themselves also need to change to help to
facilitate this bettering of child development and ultimately sort of healthy adult functioning
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in the future.
Does any what about Natalie or Mavis?
So you want to follow up with on that?
Sure, I'll jump in.
I think it really speaks to the need for researchers not to conduct our research in silos, to think
about these research policy practice kinds of partnerships and being intentional about
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building those.
Also, I feel lucky to be a part of an applied research center where we really are thinking
about solutions, but also working in tandem to evaluate interventions like Nate just mentioned
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to be able to show effects both short term as well as long term.
And I think it also speaks to the need for funding to support that kind of work and not
only those short term evaluations, but those long term evaluations.
And so really helping folks be present to see over a period of time and also to support
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the establishment of databases that allow for this research.
All of that is so important.
And we see how this research can also translate into positive practice.
I love the sort of rebuild effort that's going on in Philadelphia.
We can talk a lot about that, but it is the sort of outgoing mayor's, I guess, they're
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part of their legacy to rebuild the libraries and the parks and the rec centers in Philadelphia.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested, has been very community centered
where the community has a say in the type of amenities that are provided to communities
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and the importance of those spaces, not just for what we think about, but for after school
programming, for family reunions, for all of these things that we know sort of benefit
both children and families.
And I believe that there's a video clip that will be there to sort of talk about rebuild
to a certain extent.
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But these are the kinds of large scale initiatives, policy initiatives that can take place when
policymakers and practitioners and advocates, as well as researchers are in conversation
to say this matters.
This type of investment is absolutely necessary to address the disinvestment that has occurred
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in black communities and other underserved communities.
And I think sometimes we question the importance of our voice as researchers, but I think it
absolutely is necessary in tandem with advocates and practitioners and policymakers.
I think that's very, very well said.
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Did you have anything you wanted to add to that question, Natalie?
No, please feel free to move on.
I think that was really comprehensive and I appreciate Mavis bringing in this notion
of collaboration with localized communities because that's really what we need to be doing
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to have tailored and effective approaches.
And I think also being like recognizing that evaluation for some of the types of programs
that we're talking about is really hard and we may not be able to follow a randomized
trial, but we need to think broadly and creatively about how to build the evidence about what
works.
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So I'm going to start this next question with you, Natalie, and this question is about mindset
shifts.
So we've been talking about changes to spaces in the built environment, but can you talk
to us and share your ideas about what mindset shifts or adjustments we really need to consider
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in the early childhood field and which mindset shifts would be informed by your research?
It's a hard question.
So I think that there's been so much change in progress in the field of early childhood
over the past several decades, and I think that there is now tremendous appreciation
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and focus on inequities, which is wonderful and a lot of attention to how we can take
an anti-racist approach to understanding and addressing inequities in a way that we haven't
seen in the past.
And that's thanks to a lot of people's work across a lot of different disciplines.
I think we see changes in psychology and social work and in public health, but it's really
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coming from a lot of people who focus on early child development, which is great.
I think we have a long way to go to understand how to situate everything that we understand
about an eco-biodevelopmental model of child development within our thinking about upstream
causes.
And so while personal relationships matter, personal relationships are situated in an
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ecosystem and we want to take a structural approach so that we can be as effective for
as many people as possible.
So I think that might be somewhat of a mindset shift.
It's not saying that relationships don't matter because of course they do, but if we can shift
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our mind to think about what can we do at the higher upstream policy level to allow
for the types of relationships we typically study and know are helpful to children to
play themselves up.
So what can we do upstream to create opportunities for children to have the healthiest context
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possible?
So I think that would be the mindset shift that comes to my mind is continuing to push
to think about upstream determinants.
So I love what you just added here.
You just articulated that this is what we're talking about now, this research, it's really
about space and place.
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It's upstream, right?
It's a really good example of how to think about the work that's important and upstream.
So it's fascinating.
I'm just learning so much here with you all today.
I know that at this point we have a good amount of time for some questions from the community
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and we have some here that Tassie and her team have already curated and I'm going to
start with one and I'll just open the floor and whoever is interested can just respond
to it.
So one question is what does the research show us about the different types of impacts
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that racism has in early childhood education and poverty?
What that they have in early childhood development?
What similarities do we see and what differences do we see about the different how the different
types of racism affect young children?
And I'm assuming by types of racism they're talking about structural, interpersonal, internalized,
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et cetera.
Well, I'll just jump in and say from our systematic review of the literature on protective community
resources, what we found was that even though we looked at a decade of research, right?
So from 2012 until 2022.
(37:29):
So research that was published within that sort of last decade.
I know we're in 2023 but we sort of ended in 2022.
And I think one thing we identify some gaps and it's in that report that you referenced
earlier Stephanie that we need more in group or group specific types of studies.
(37:52):
Because right now so much of the research and I understand researchers who are trying
to be published in the top journals of their particular field, they actually will rely
on a lot of survey data or data that includes a diverse population of participants so that
(38:13):
they can sort of draw and generalize the findings, right?
But when we do that, we give up something, right?
There's no perfect study.
You know, they're opposing cons to all kinds of approaches.
And that's the reason we need a mix of studies because at this particular point, we don't
have a lot of group specific studies.
(38:36):
And it's hard for us to sort of talk about what this means, like the impact of racism,
for example, the impact of anti-black racism on young people, how that differs across,
you know, region of the country, across socioeconomic status.
There are so many in group, very specific questions that we don't know the answer to
(39:01):
because we haven't had that type of research.
And then by the same token, we can say what supports, you know, youth versus young children's
development and when we start talking about youth, when we look at sexual and gender identity
and how that has different effects and, you know, affects the experiences of young people
(39:25):
differently.
All of these become questions that show that even though there is an abundance of research
that we have been constrained by measures, a lot of it, we're using, you know, quantitative
survey designs that can limit the kinds of questions that we can ask and the measures
(39:48):
that we've had in the past.
I mean, just thinking about the different types of racism, that's a fairly current conversation.
And so people are just beginning.
So I wish that we could say more, but I think one thing that we can say is in this literature,
there are large gaps.
And so we need to embrace the importance of those very group specific questions and encourage
(40:15):
researchers to go ahead and do it.
You know, I don't think that there's been the same level of permission to do those kinds
of studies in the past, but we know their importance and we need to give each other
and ourselves and, you know, the various researchers who are coming into the pipeline permission
to conduct those kinds of studies.
(40:36):
Yeah, so I echo and support everything you're saying.
And just this idea of how we need to expand and diversify our research, just in terms
of measures, in terms of samples, in terms of qualitative versus quantitative.
I think that that is a really good, thoughtful and big agenda for how we move forward in
(41:03):
a way that can answer these questions.
So it's great.
I'm going to ask this question from an audience member, which I think is really interesting
is which one point about racism's impact on early child development?
Do you do you wish that we as researchers or the public policymakers, practitioners
(41:27):
that we understood more?
So let's think about one point is, but the person that's the challenge.
For me, the one point that comes to my mind is I think that there is could be often a
misconception that the consequences of experience.
Well, first of all, I think people hear the word racism and very often the default thought
(41:49):
is interpersonal experiences of racism and not thinking across different levels.
So number one, but I think that there's a conventional thought that the damage would
be psychological or emotional without thinking about the broader span of consequences that
there are implications of the range of types of racist experiences that people have, interpersonally
(42:11):
and within their day to day experiences in systems and structural environments that affect
cognitive development and social development and health, physical health is impacted as
Nate had talked about sleep.
The whole range of developmental outcomes that we study are beginning to be studied
in relation to a variety of forms of racism.
(42:33):
We shouldn't underestimate the pervasive impacts that it can have.
That is a hard question because we know how pervasive the effects have been.
So I would cheat and I would try to at least to come to mind, top of mind.
(42:58):
And one is the relationship between racism and economic violence.
Or when I talk about economic violence, again, drawing from the domestic violence definitions
of obstructions to economic mobility and opportunity, because in that way, we see the interface
(43:20):
between racism and poverty, you know, economic disinvestment in communities and all that
means for children's well-being, their health, the built environment.
So that's one thing.
But I think also importantly, how racism and its pervasiveness in American society through
media, through representations and education, the effect that that has had on one's identity
(43:46):
development, on young children's identity development, what we see that in terms of
youth and what we're seeing in terms of research where, you know, young black, young adults,
black youth feel less tied to a black identity than previous generations.
(44:08):
And what does that mean for young black children as they develop in a society that is still
characterized by anti-black racism when young black children do not have a sort of positive
racial identity?
And how do they then begin to understand the system that they're in and how do they learn
(44:30):
to navigate that system?
So the effects of racism not only on like racial identity for young children and their
whole identity, their personhood identity, but also its association with economic deprivation
and violence in the United States.
Those would be two things.
Yeah.
(44:50):
So I'm also going to cheat in answering this question because I think that the question
itself really dovetails nicely with both Dr. Slob and Dr. Sanders' answers to, you know,
what is the mindset shift we need to have in this sort of field?
And especially for those of us in neuroscience, I think it's really important to recognize
that we really haven't done that much in terms of trying to understand this sort of intersection
(45:16):
of racialization, socioeconomic deprivation, and violence that children are exposed to.
We spent a lot of time thinking about how, you know, environmental deprivation or exposure
to different threats to the environment might affect children in general.
We've done two decades of work looking at all of this.
But in terms of acknowledging or accepting that the experiences that, say, Black or white
(45:42):
children might have are different as a result of this sort of socio-historical or cultural
pressures that's been placed on the environments that people now grow up in, there's been very
limited to do with that.
And also going back to Dr. Sanders' point, and it's something that, you know, our work
is trying to move to.
We haven't done a good job of it.
(46:03):
We focused a lot on group differences and potential contributors to that.
But we haven't explored or begun to scratch the surface of what's happening within groups.
What might be different for individuals who are still exposed to these high levels of
racism but come from less socioeconomically disadvantaged areas?
What's the sort of impact on the brain?
(46:25):
And again, we know, again, it's been almost 100 years, maybe more, figuring out these
regions are really important for emotion, really important for different psychiatric
disorders.
And if we really want to have a full understanding of what the consequences of stress are, what
the consequences of racism are, and what the sort of brain basis for disorders are so we
can make these generalizable, equitable treatments for the entire citizenry of the United States,
(46:50):
we really need to figure out what's happening there, especially in childhood and how this
sort of intersection between racialization and these threat and deprivation, other aspects
of thinking about childhood development are intersecting to achieve those goals.
So I have a quick follow up question for Mavis.
Were you and when you were talking, did you say that children nowadays have a less of
(47:16):
attachment to their Black identity than in prior years, decades?
Can you talk more about that?
I just have to send you the poll.
And so I don't want to share the source, but I'm almost sure what the source is.
But once I share it, it's documented, you know, and so I will send that link.
But yes, they were just looking at across generations in terms of identification with
(47:44):
one sort of racial identity.
And we know that young people, I think younger than 30 have a different level of attachment
than previous generations.
And I will make sure that I send that study so that it can be added as a resource for
participants moving forward.
(48:05):
Yeah, that's really interesting and compelling.
I see a lot of little shocked emojis floating up, you know, with that.
So yes, please make sure that we all get that.
I have another question that I'm going to go to here.
OK, and I again, I'll throw this out to anyone.
(48:25):
How do you think we can ensure that future research contributes to this dismantling of
racial inequalities and of building those conditions for success?
How do you think future research?
What do you think future research needs to do?
And for everyone, that's a field, not just you all's research.
(48:49):
I would say that Nate has sort of laid it out.
Natalie has also laid it out in terms of, you know, group specific studies, in terms
of new questions and the development of new measures, the actual full use of the existing
(49:10):
measures that are out there around economic opportunity and the opportunity index scale
that Natalie was talking about using a variety of approaches, engaging with the community
to see about community questions.
What is important in those communities?
(49:31):
We talked about research policy practice partnerships and research.
So I think all of those, you know, those are at least four areas in terms of the approach.
Who has a say in the types of questions that we're asking and answering?
You know, what is what type of supports and funding are available for us to do these specific
(49:56):
kinds of studies and vehicles for publication?
And then for those who are in higher ed and academia, whether or not our institutions
of higher education are also valuing these and our promotion and tenure committees are
also valuing them.
And so that as people do this type of research, they're not fearful that they won't be able
(50:21):
to advance in their chosen field in academia.
So it really means that we have to start bringing all of these various parties into the conversation
because we know this research is important, that there are so many institutions and systems
that are in place that may limit people's opportunity to engage in this.
(50:48):
What I really love about you all as panelists is that you are all coming from different
perspectives, right?
So it's sort of really interdisciplinary.
And I think that's a strength.
When I talked about the ECRQ special issue, also it's interdisciplinary.
And I'm wondering, when we think about research for the future, I'm wondering if there could
(51:10):
be some way in which instead of approaching these questions as individual scientists,
can we approach things as a collaborative, right?
So that we can go deeper.
And I just think that that is such a good proactive way to allow the science to advance.
(51:34):
And I'm hoping that people can hear it, funders, federal agencies, I'm hoping that they can
hear this as well and really see the power of what we can learn when we have an interdisciplinary
group working on issues.
We have about five minutes.
I'm going to give you all each some time to do a takeaway message.
(51:58):
And so the takeaway message is please share a positive outcome or development in your
work related to communities, policies, and research that we can take with us.
So an idea that we can leave with us that will help us sort of feel empowered to learn
and grow and continue this work.
(52:19):
So what's a positive you want to leave with us?
Well, one positive that I have is that it seems to be a convergence that I see around
advocacy groups, policy groups, researchers that understand the importance of disentangling
(52:47):
the effects or highlighting the effects of systemic, the way systems and organizations
affect outcomes and not just reporting outcomes, but really trying to help people understand
the context in which those outcomes are produced.
(53:09):
And so that's moving us forward in the conversation.
So we're not reporting just, oh, there's a gap in academic achievement between black
children and youth and white children and youth.
We're talking about the institutional effects of underfunding education and relying on tax,
(53:34):
you know, property tax base or whatever, and the long-term effects of economic inequity,
educational and economic inequities to lead to these outcomes.
So the importance of contextualizing these findings so that we take our research gains
(53:55):
for the systems that produce them rather than the individuals I think is really important.
And it seems as though I feel as though there's much more support for that and almost an expectation
of that moving forward.
So we can hold on to that and push that.
That I think that that helps us to change and create those kinds of environments that
(54:19):
all children deserve and need to thrive.
So I love that.
What about Natalie and Nate?
What is your takeaway, your positive takeaway you want to leave us with?
Well, I feel very encouraged about the attention that we see across the different disciplines
thinking about early childhood to context.
I think there has been this shift that we've all observed over the past decade that has
(54:44):
made it almost an expectation to be thinking about across topics.
And I think that our data sources are catching up and we have more and more opportunities.
Say if we're researchers who rely on large federally funded cohort studies, for example,
(55:04):
they are collecting more information that allows us to study both risk factors but also
protective factors, which is an incredibly important future direction as well.
And so I think that we have increasing opportunities to take a very comprehensive look at social
environments that shape child development, both the positive and the negative, and also
(55:26):
to take a multilevel perspective, which we know is going to be really important for figuring
out upstream strategies for intervention.
Yeah.
Okay.
Great.
Great.
What about you, Nate?
Yeah, I think both of these are great.
And I wish I could just answer that, but I'll try to come up with something unique very
quickly.
I think for me, I'm not unaware of the sort of storied history that neuroscience has played
(55:52):
and the way in which people will use biology to justify a lot of, let's say, racist behavior
and the way that sort of, you know, structuralizing the institutions that we have.
It's been very, very encouraging to see more people pay attention to this and really get
the data to show that, you know, it's not this sort of ingrained brain thing.
(56:16):
It's the systems that we've developed, it's the structures that are in place that are
contributing to altered development and playing a role that it's doing.
I think, you know, to sort of increase recognition and having the data to really emphasize this
has just been really positive for me.
Yeah.
I tell you, I am so filled up with knowledge and encouraged as a scientist by this conversation
(56:40):
with you all.
I really feel as though we need more conversations like this.
We just scratched the surface here.
And it's been so lovely meeting you all.
And I want to say that I hope we can continue this conversation in meaningful ways.
And I want to thank you for being part of this panel and bringing your knowledge here
(57:04):
in this space.
And I thank you on behalf of Harvard and the Center on the Developing Child.
I thank you on behalf of Boston University and SEED.
And I look forward to continuing these conversations with you all.
The Brain Architects is a product of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
(57:27):
You can find us at developingchild.harvard.edu, where we will post any resources that were
discussed in this episode.
The next webinar in our Place Matters webinar series is on March 5th at 12 p.m. Eastern
Standard Time.
Stay tuned to our social channels for more details.
You can find us on Twitter at Harvard Center, Facebook at Center Developing Child, and Instagram
(57:51):
at Developing Child Harvard.
Your music is Brain Power by Miele Collective.
Welcome to the Brain Architects, the podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at
(00:08):
Harvard University.
I'm Cameron Seymour Hawkins, the Center's Communications Coordinator.
Our center believes that advances in the science of child development provide a powerful source
of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and their caregivers.
By sharing the latest science from the field, we hope to help you make that science actionable
(00:31):
and apply it in your work in ways that can increase your impact.
In December, we continued our Place Matters webinar series with our second installment,
Understanding Racism's Impact on Child Development, Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United
States.
During the webinar, Drs. Stephanie Currington, Nathaniel Hartnett, Maevis Sanders, and Natalie
(00:55):
Slopen discussed their latest research, exploring how racism gets under the skin to impact children's
development and how it contributes to unequal access to opportunity in the places where
children live, grow, play, and learn.
Together, they explored ways to dismantle systemic barriers and worked towards solutions
(01:15):
that promote healthy child development.
We're excited to share this conversation on today's episode of the Brain Architects podcast.
Now, without further ado, here's Tessie Warren, the Center's Deputy Director and Chief Strategy
Officer, who will set the stage for our conversation.
Hello.
(01:38):
Welcome to today's webinar, Understanding Racism's Impact on Child Development, Working
Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.
We're so excited to bring you into this conversation.
Whether you're joining us for the first time or are regular to the Center on the Developing
Child, thank you for being here today.
(01:59):
This webinar is part of our Place Matters webinar series.
The series is designed to expand upon our Center's recent work on how influences from
our environments, particularly the built and natural environments, play a role in shaping
early childhood development, beginning before birth.
Throughout this series, we're highlighting scientific and community expertise and offering
(02:23):
strategies to work towards fairness of place and to create the conditions that will allow
all children to thrive.
Today's conversation will explore the intersection between policy, systemic inequalities, racial
disparities, and children's healthy development.
We hope that you'll gain insights that are helpful to you in the work you do in support
(02:45):
of children and families.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions when registering for this event.
We received hundreds of submitted questions.
We'll be asking some of those questions in the second half of the conversation.
Of course, we will not have time to address all the questions that were submitted or we
would be here for days, but we were really intrigued going through all of the questions
(03:10):
that were submitted and we appreciate the thought provoking ideas that you all brought
to mind for us.
So we will be thinking about how those questions can inform future conversations.
So I am really excited in just a second to hand it over to Dr. Stephanie Currenton, who
we are incredibly lucky to have leading this conversation for us today.
(03:33):
Dr. Currenton is a professor in the education leadership and policy studies department at
Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and is the director
of the Center on the Ecology of Early Development or SEAD.
SEAD's research and initiatives serve to inform policies that promote equity and justice for
(03:54):
racially and ethnically minoritized children in the context of education, health, and community.
She is joined today by an outstanding panel of researchers, Dr. Nathaniel Hartnett, Dr.
Navis Sanders, and Dr. Natalie Slipkin.
Dr. Hartnett is director of the Neurobiology of Effective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory
(04:16):
at McLean Hospital and an assistant professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Hartnett's research is focused on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate
susceptibility to trauma and stress-related disorders.
Dr. Sanders is a senior research scholar of Black children and families at Child Trends,
(04:40):
where she leads an applied research agenda that advances racial equity and social justice.
Before joining Child Trends in 2021, Dr. Sanders served as a professor of education and affiliate
professor in the doctoral program in language, literacy, and culture at the University of
Maryland Baltimore County.
Dr. Slipkin is an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan
(05:05):
School of Public Health.
Dr. Slipkin is a social epidemiologist, and her research focuses on social and contextual
factors that shape childhood development and inequities in health.
Now, I'll let Dr. Currington share more about herself and kick off our conversation.
Hello, everyone, I am honored to be here to moderate this conversation and to represent
(05:30):
SEAD as well as Boston University.
As Tassie was saying, our work at SEAD specifically focuses on understanding how racism impacts
Black children's growth and development and the ways in which families use their cultural
assets and social capital to protect themselves from the harm of racism.
(05:50):
And we know that this conversation we're having today is critically important because racism
operates on multiple levels and it impacts young children throughout all levels of their
biology, their social development, and other ecological systems.
And in the prenatal phase and the first years of life, they are the most sensitive developmental
(06:12):
period.
So it's really critical to understand how racism exerts its impact on the health and
growth of prenatal children and infants and toddlers.
As a scholar myself, I've been investigating and doing work on the topic of racism in young
children's learning for decades.
By the fall of 2024, SEAD, along with our partners at Equity Research Action Coalition,
(06:38):
will be publishing a special issue for Early Childhood Research Quarterly on this topic,
featuring researchers from a variety of disciplines and highlighting the work of several junior
scholars.
So the scientific evidence is clear and it's growing that racism imposes unique and substantial
stressors on the daily lives of families and caregivers.
(07:00):
And understanding how these stressors affect child health and development provides a compelling
framework for understanding and protecting young children.
Such frameworks are the RISE 3 model for which I'm a co-author with Dr. Yoma Arruca.
It presents new ideas about how communities, policies, programs, and funding streams might
(07:22):
confront and dismantle inequalities and build a stronger future for all of us.
But we're here today because there's so much opportunity ahead of us at the community level,
at the policy level, and in all the work that brings each of us to this conversation today.
As the Center on the Developing Child wrote in their Place Matters paper that was published
(07:46):
earlier this year, it says, just as dimensions of the built and natural environment have
been designed over time, they can be redesigned to support healthy development.
So throughout our discussion today, we will share ways to redesign, rethink, and advance
forward in pursuit of creating environments that are anti-racist and can support all children's
(08:10):
healthy development.
And with that, I'm so excited to be moderating this conversation with Nate and Natalie and
Mavis.
And I'm going to start the conversation with Nate.
So Nate, can you share what you've observed in your recent research in early childhood
(08:30):
emotional health?
Specifically, how have you observed the effects of racism on children's brain development
and how are you able to expose a direct relationship to structural racism in your findings?
Yes.
Thank you so much, Dr. Curran.
Thank you very much for having me.
Just to set the stage for answering that question, my lab is really interested in understanding
(08:54):
how we identify and prevent the development of things like trauma and stress related disorders.
And we know that the stress that people experience during childhood really plays a role in the
development of those disorders.
And we know that there are these really strong racial disparities between the amount of stress
that people are exposed to, where Black and other racially and ethically marginalized
(09:14):
individuals are exposed to a disproportionate amount of stress.
And so what we've been trying to do is to understand how the places in which children
are growing up is related to the developments in brain structure and function and how that
might play a role in the player development of PTSD.
And so one of the more recent things that we've done is we've looked at data from this
(09:35):
large scale, longitudinous study of child development called the Adolescent Brain and
Cognitive Development Study.
This is a study of about 10 to 12,000 kids that started when they were about nine to
10 years old.
And we were looking at the volume of gray matter of different brain regions that we
know are really important for emotion, learning and memory.
(09:57):
This includes things like the prefrontal cortex, really important for attention and top down
regulation of people's emotional responses.
And then regions like the amygdala hippocampus, which are really important for expressing
that emotional response, that fear response to something stressful.
And what we found was that if you look at the brain volume of white children compared
(10:17):
to black children, you see that black children show these decrements in gray matter volume
of these different brain regions.
But what's really important is if you look at the environments that they're growing up
in, if you look at the amount of income that black children have or their parents have,
if you look at this thing called the area deprivation index, this way of looking at
the amount of resources available in these different environments, if you look at the
(10:40):
amount of conflict that's happening in the homes, there are really strong racial disparities
in all these different areas where black children are really living in these areas that have
much more deprivation.
There's much more conflict in the homes and there's much lower income across those.
And all of those things are related to gray matter volume in this study.
And so once we go through, to address your question of how do we actually expose this
(11:04):
direct link, once we go through, we try to normalize these mathematically.
Once we try to account for all those, you really don't see strong racially differences
in gray matter volume anymore.
This is really important because we also look to see how are the volumes of these regions
tied to PTSD symptoms, even at nine and 10 years old.
(11:24):
And so you wouldn't expect large symptoms of PTSD.
You wouldn't expect many people to reach the level of the disorder.
And you don't see that, but you really still see, even at nine and 10, differences in the
severity of PTSD symptoms, differences in the levels of trauma exposure at nine and
10 years old between white and black individuals.
(11:45):
And once you sort of normalize, once you sort of equalize the environment, the places that
they're growing up in, you really see these sort of normalizations of brain volume too.
And so we're really thinking about, how do we address this question that the webinar
is about, the sort of aspect of place and how that's related to where kids are growing
up so that we can help to alleviate some of these brain differences that we see that are
(12:08):
going to have a role in how these individuals develop into the future.
So this is just absolutely fascinating.
I was taking copious notes here and I can't wait until we get to the question and answer
session to talk more.
But at this point though, I want to give Natalie a chance to talk about some of her recent
work that is centered on racial disparities and the physical and mental health of young
(12:32):
children.
So Natalie, can you tell us about your research and how you're finding links to inequitable
experiences and opportunities, particularly as it relates to inequalities in the places
where caregivers are raising their young children?
Yes.
Thank you so much for having me here and for the opportunity to share the work that I've
(12:54):
been doing along with my students.
So my research is focused on understanding how inequitable experiences of opportunity
for healthy development that are shaped by our systems and structures affect healthy
development and contribute to inequities that we see across socioeconomic position as well
as across racial and ethnic groups with marginalized racial and ethnic children from marginalized
(13:22):
groups often displaying worse outcomes early in the life course.
And we know that these differences emerge over time.
So health is rooted in childhood.
And so it's really important to understand the systems and structures that are in place
very early on affecting children and their families so that we can identify where and
(13:42):
how we can intervene.
And so I have been working on research across a variety of topics, thinking about what are
different systems and structures that children interact with that are relevant to health
in the earliest years of life.
And one of the areas very relevant to today's topic is housing.
(14:03):
And one of the areas that I'm interested in is also in neighborhoods.
And so I thought I could give an example of a study that I published this past year related
to neighborhoods that connects to the topic for today.
So this was a study that we published in pediatrics and we drew on a large national data source
called the mortality disparities in American communities.
(14:26):
And what we did is we connected information about over a million children in the United
States coming from the American community surveys, linking it to information about the
neighborhoods that they were living in.
So here we were using a neighborhood measure called the Child Opportunity Index.
And then we followed the children were followed with death record data for 11 years.
(14:50):
And so what our study found was that residing in neighborhoods with lower opportunity based
on this measure of the Child Opportunity Index was associated with increases for mortality
for children as well as for their parents.
And so we felt as though it was important to document the intergenerational consequences
(15:12):
of neighborhood settings and the importance of implementing place based policies to reduce
the inequities that children experience that will have consequences as time goes on.
And so that particular study that I'm talking about was focused on outcome of mortality,
but there's a huge literature documenting the role that inequitable neighborhood environments
(15:36):
have across many dimensions of social, emotional, behavioral development in children and then
health outcomes that we see as individuals age over the life course.
So that's an interesting area of work.
And one of the topics that I'm very interested in is how we best measure neighborhood context
for health.
So there's a lot of leading, you know, a lot of popular measures of neighborhood environments.
(16:01):
And I think there's a lot of open questions about which is going to be most useful for
us and in which context.
So some measures may be best when we're thinking about how to decide where to implement certain
programs or policies, whereas other may be useful, you know, for research purposes.
And so I think there's a lot of open questions that we can answer using science about the
(16:24):
best ways to conceptualize what the characteristics of neighborhoods matter most for children.
And then finally, another topic that I'm interested in has to do with heterogeneity or variation
in the way children respond to their environments, thinking that that can help us to understand
how to develop interventions that can close gaps in outcomes to lead to more equitable
(16:52):
health and development for all children.
Well, again, just some really compelling research and just really, really, really interesting
and compelling, somewhat a little sad too.
So I will turn it over to Mavis.
(17:13):
And Mavis, you and your team of researchers recently developed an interactive tool that
allows users to, such as users, such as policymakers, practitioners or researchers to browse a
decade of literature on the effects of protective community resources and with the aim to explore
how these resources can mitigate the impacts of risks faced by children and youth, including
(17:39):
racism as one of those risks.
So during your review of this extensive body of work, can you share more about some of
your key discoveries?
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Stephanie.
Thank you for the invitation to this conversation.
Just to provide a bit of context, my co-authors and I, including Jennifer Winston, Shana Rochester
(18:03):
and Dominique Martinez, I definitely wanted to give a shout out.
We have been engaged in a process since I arrived at Child Trends to develop a research
agenda, which we sort of collectively throughout the organization decided would acknowledge
the diversity in the black community, be strengths based, be systems focused and solutions based
(18:29):
as well.
And we went through a three step process.
And I believe that there'll be a brief in the chat box to identify, we went through
this three step process to identify the research priorities.
So you can imagine it was a large option, a large number of options that we could have
(18:51):
pursued.
And so what we decided through this three step process is to focus on black family cultural
assets and community protective resources.
My colleague, Krishana Lloyd, will be focused on black family cultural assets and I am focused
on protective community resources.
As part of that process, we engaged in a systematic review of protective community resources and
(19:21):
how they relate to child and youth development.
We had 3000 studies initially, we were able to reduce those to about 300 and so odd studies
that went before review and then it was reduced further to 172 studies.
So the bibliographic tool that you reference includes information for those 172 studies
(19:47):
that users can filter based on either the race of the participants or the age of the
participants or the type of protective community resource people are interested in.
And so for this discussion, because we're talking a lot about mental well-being, cognitive
(20:09):
development and so forth, when we look at those outcomes and it's also filterable by
outcomes, things like community cohesion and support rise to the top as being consistently
significant across this very diverse body of literature.
So I want to put that out there.
It's really hard to come to draw any absolutes, but there is a preponderance of evidence that
(20:36):
suggests that community role models and mentors, positive peer support, school connectedness
and engagement in community-based activities as well as neighborhood amenities all contribute
to the positive mental health of young people and that they can mitigate some of the risks
(20:57):
and I think that's what Natalie was talking about, that's in communities.
And what that suggests to me is that relationships matter, but also the spaces for people together
and build those kinds of relationships that were so important to young people's development.
So I'd be happy to talk about that further as this conversation unfolds.
(21:18):
Yes, I'm going to ask you another question, Mavis, about your work.
Your team released a brief in November that was called Black Children and Youth Can Benefit
from Focused Research on Protective Community Resources and in that brief you stated several
neighborhood amenities and services that were associated with that health and safety.
(21:40):
Can you name some more of those specifically?
Yeah, absolutely.
When we, and then Natalie talked about this as well, the constraints that we have as researchers
by the measures that we have, right?
But we are improving in those areas.
(22:01):
Neighborhood amenities specifically, which is one of the areas that we found to have
a significant and positive relationship and association with black children's flourishing
and development.
One of those, you can think of those amenities as parks, recreation centers, libraries, sidewalks.
(22:25):
So people who are familiar with the National Survey of Children's Health are familiar with
that sort of neighborhood amenities measure that includes those.
There are also some studies that are really interested around walkability of a city.
So how is the sort of city laid out to promote walking as a mode of transportation?
(22:49):
So you look at public transportation as how buildings are laid out, the lighting that
is available, all of those things.
And so we also published one brief where we looked at flourishing and flourishing was
just looking at individuals' ability to stick to a particular topic or a particular task
(23:14):
until the end, their ability to control their emotions and those kinds of things.
And we found that young people who had access to all four of those neighborhood amenities,
sidewalks, green spaces and parks, libraries, and rec centers were more likely to flourish
(23:38):
or to have those sort of mental health indicators of flourishing than children who did not have
access to those four amenities.
We also found another study suggested that young men who were in cities with walkability,
so young black male adolescents were less likely to report being involved in physical
(24:01):
violence of any sort when they lived in cities or neighborhoods with higher walkability scales.
So those are just two of the sort of space-based or built environment elements that we've seen
make a difference in the outcomes that we're interested in for black children at U.
(24:25):
Yeah, again, this is just so the research that all of you are talking about is just
really, really emphasizing the importance of place and the importance of relationships
within the context of spaces and places.
So it's just fascinating to me.
I'm going to circle back to Natalie now and ask you, Natalie, about the Child Opportunity
(24:49):
Index and how you use that in your work.
So specifically, can you share with us more about this tool and how that tool in particular
might help us better understand health disparities in places where children live and grow?
So the Child Opportunity Index is a measurement tool that was developed by Dolores Acevedo
(25:12):
Garcia and her colleagues, notably Clemens Nelopi, who is a major contributor as well.
They're based at Brandeis University.
And they developed this measure as a way to think about the opportunities that are available
to children in various communities across the United States.
So it's an example of a place-based measure that's aiming to evaluate or quantify resources
(25:35):
and opportunities specifically as related to children's well-being and future prospects.
So there are other place-based composite measures of advances or disadvantages that exist.
So Nate had mentioned the Area Deprivation Index as an example.
There's the Social Vulnerability Index.
There's really a host.
(25:55):
There's an Environmental Justice Index.
But this is the only one that I'm aware of that I've seen in the literature that's really
tailored and designed to think about those aspects of an environment that matter for
child development specifically.
So thinking about quality of education and health care, neighborhood characteristics
of the built environment, such as those that Mavis had just mentioned, like walkability
(26:17):
and safety, and other essential elements of neighborhoods and communities.
And so this measure is used by many different types of individuals and organizations.
It's very well designed to highlight disparities in access to opportunities across different
demographic groups and across geographic areas.
(26:40):
So this can help people to think about which contexts really require certain types of
investments or interventions, and where we may see the greatest impacts of investments
for improving outcomes among perhaps underserved communities.
And so the data is, you know, we have this data nationally across the United States,
(27:04):
and it's been being used by researchers as well as a lot of different public health departments
at this time.
Great, great.
So happy to learn too that that was built here in Massachusetts.
That's very great.
I'm going to switch to talking about the implications for you all's work, and I'm going to open
(27:27):
it up to each of you.
So I know that it's hard for researchers to come up with policy recommendations or community
strategies specifically, because we are scientists and researchers by training.
But can you think about your research and how it informs strategies to support child
(27:48):
development at either that community level or that larger systems level?
And I'm going to circle back to Nate and let him start.
You chose the one that it's hard to answer.
So I think that, you know, for us in the brain imaging field, it's sometimes hard to think
about how does showing pictures of the brain to people really help with this type of thing
(28:12):
and how do we address policy?
But I think that one of the benefits of the work that we do is that we really can show
these effects very strongly.
It's one thing when you ask people, you know, do you think that discrimination has an impact
on well-being?
And you can get in this argument of, oh, is it perceived?
Is it this thing?
But we can actually look at the brain.
(28:33):
We can actually look at what happens.
When you keep people in these impoverished environments, I think that's really powerful.
We've done a bit in terms of reaching out both to talking with individuals at the Center
for Law, Brain, Behavior with Francis Shen and thinking about how do we actually talk
to people in positions of power, people who are making laws, people who are making policy
(28:55):
and actually showing them the data to just say, look, this is a real thing.
We can really see it in the people that we're looking at.
It's not something you can really get away from.
You know, and I think that there are other things that we've thought about in terms of,
you know, what are the actual policies that we can do?
But I think, you know, one thing that I've said in the past is like, well, we know that
even though there's heterogeneity in the results, even things like cash transfers are associated
(29:18):
with changes in the brain.
They're very reliably in some ways associated with changes in mental health and behavior.
And I think that part of the reason you see these heterogeneities in some of the findings
is for the exact reason that we're talking about here, right, and that the place that
people are growing up and the actual structures themselves also need to change to help to
facilitate this bettering of child development and ultimately sort of healthy adult functioning
(29:42):
in the future.
Does any what about Natalie or Mavis?
So you want to follow up with on that?
Sure, I'll jump in.
I think it really speaks to the need for researchers not to conduct our research in silos, to think
about these research policy practice kinds of partnerships and being intentional about
(30:08):
building those.
Also, I feel lucky to be a part of an applied research center where we really are thinking
about solutions, but also working in tandem to evaluate interventions like Nate just mentioned
(30:30):
to be able to show effects both short term as well as long term.
And I think it also speaks to the need for funding to support that kind of work and not
only those short term evaluations, but those long term evaluations.
And so really helping folks be present to see over a period of time and also to support
(30:55):
the establishment of databases that allow for this research.
All of that is so important.
And we see how this research can also translate into positive practice.
I love the sort of rebuild effort that's going on in Philadelphia.
We can talk a lot about that, but it is the sort of outgoing mayor's, I guess, they're
(31:21):
part of their legacy to rebuild the libraries and the parks and the rec centers in Philadelphia.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested, has been very community centered
where the community has a say in the type of amenities that are provided to communities
(31:42):
and the importance of those spaces, not just for what we think about, but for after school
programming, for family reunions, for all of these things that we know sort of benefit
both children and families.
And I believe that there's a video clip that will be there to sort of talk about rebuild
to a certain extent.
(32:02):
But these are the kinds of large scale initiatives, policy initiatives that can take place when
policymakers and practitioners and advocates, as well as researchers are in conversation
to say this matters.
This type of investment is absolutely necessary to address the disinvestment that has occurred
(32:26):
in black communities and other underserved communities.
And I think sometimes we question the importance of our voice as researchers, but I think it
absolutely is necessary in tandem with advocates and practitioners and policymakers.
I think that's very, very well said.
(32:47):
Did you have anything you wanted to add to that question, Natalie?
No, please feel free to move on.
I think that was really comprehensive and I appreciate Mavis bringing in this notion
of collaboration with localized communities because that's really what we need to be doing
(33:10):
to have tailored and effective approaches.
And I think also being like recognizing that evaluation for some of the types of programs
that we're talking about is really hard and we may not be able to follow a randomized
trial, but we need to think broadly and creatively about how to build the evidence about what
works.
(33:30):
So I'm going to start this next question with you, Natalie, and this question is about mindset
shifts.
So we've been talking about changes to spaces in the built environment, but can you talk
to us and share your ideas about what mindset shifts or adjustments we really need to consider
(33:51):
in the early childhood field and which mindset shifts would be informed by your research?
It's a hard question.
So I think that there's been so much change in progress in the field of early childhood
over the past several decades, and I think that there is now tremendous appreciation
(34:14):
and focus on inequities, which is wonderful and a lot of attention to how we can take
an anti-racist approach to understanding and addressing inequities in a way that we haven't
seen in the past.
And that's thanks to a lot of people's work across a lot of different disciplines.
I think we see changes in psychology and social work and in public health, but it's really
(34:38):
coming from a lot of people who focus on early child development, which is great.
I think we have a long way to go to understand how to situate everything that we understand
about an eco-biodevelopmental model of child development within our thinking about upstream
causes.
And so while personal relationships matter, personal relationships are situated in an
(35:00):
ecosystem and we want to take a structural approach so that we can be as effective for
as many people as possible.
So I think that might be somewhat of a mindset shift.
It's not saying that relationships don't matter because of course they do, but if we can shift
(35:21):
our mind to think about what can we do at the higher upstream policy level to allow
for the types of relationships we typically study and know are helpful to children to
play themselves up.
So what can we do upstream to create opportunities for children to have the healthiest context
(35:41):
possible?
So I think that would be the mindset shift that comes to my mind is continuing to push
to think about upstream determinants.
So I love what you just added here.
You just articulated that this is what we're talking about now, this research, it's really
about space and place.
(36:03):
It's upstream, right?
It's a really good example of how to think about the work that's important and upstream.
So it's fascinating.
I'm just learning so much here with you all today.
I know that at this point we have a good amount of time for some questions from the community
(36:26):
and we have some here that Tassie and her team have already curated and I'm going to
start with one and I'll just open the floor and whoever is interested can just respond
to it.
So one question is what does the research show us about the different types of impacts
(36:46):
that racism has in early childhood education and poverty?
What that they have in early childhood development?
What similarities do we see and what differences do we see about the different how the different
types of racism affect young children?
And I'm assuming by types of racism they're talking about structural, interpersonal, internalized,
(37:08):
et cetera.
Well, I'll just jump in and say from our systematic review of the literature on protective community
resources, what we found was that even though we looked at a decade of research, right?
So from 2012 until 2022.
(37:29):
So research that was published within that sort of last decade.
I know we're in 2023 but we sort of ended in 2022.
And I think one thing we identify some gaps and it's in that report that you referenced
earlier Stephanie that we need more in group or group specific types of studies.
(37:52):
Because right now so much of the research and I understand researchers who are trying
to be published in the top journals of their particular field, they actually will rely
on a lot of survey data or data that includes a diverse population of participants so that
(38:13):
they can sort of draw and generalize the findings, right?
But when we do that, we give up something, right?
There's no perfect study.
You know, they're opposing cons to all kinds of approaches.
And that's the reason we need a mix of studies because at this particular point, we don't
have a lot of group specific studies.
(38:36):
And it's hard for us to sort of talk about what this means, like the impact of racism,
for example, the impact of anti-black racism on young people, how that differs across,
you know, region of the country, across socioeconomic status.
There are so many in group, very specific questions that we don't know the answer to
(39:01):
because we haven't had that type of research.
And then by the same token, we can say what supports, you know, youth versus young children's
development and when we start talking about youth, when we look at sexual and gender identity
and how that has different effects and, you know, affects the experiences of young people
(39:25):
differently.
All of these become questions that show that even though there is an abundance of research
that we have been constrained by measures, a lot of it, we're using, you know, quantitative
survey designs that can limit the kinds of questions that we can ask and the measures
(39:48):
that we've had in the past.
I mean, just thinking about the different types of racism, that's a fairly current conversation.
And so people are just beginning.
So I wish that we could say more, but I think one thing that we can say is in this literature,
there are large gaps.
And so we need to embrace the importance of those very group specific questions and encourage
(40:15):
researchers to go ahead and do it.
You know, I don't think that there's been the same level of permission to do those kinds
of studies in the past, but we know their importance and we need to give each other
and ourselves and, you know, the various researchers who are coming into the pipeline permission
to conduct those kinds of studies.
(40:36):
Yeah, so I echo and support everything you're saying.
And just this idea of how we need to expand and diversify our research, just in terms
of measures, in terms of samples, in terms of qualitative versus quantitative.
I think that that is a really good, thoughtful and big agenda for how we move forward in
(41:03):
a way that can answer these questions.
So it's great.
I'm going to ask this question from an audience member, which I think is really interesting
is which one point about racism's impact on early child development?
Do you do you wish that we as researchers or the public policymakers, practitioners
(41:27):
that we understood more?
So let's think about one point is, but the person that's the challenge.
For me, the one point that comes to my mind is I think that there is could be often a
misconception that the consequences of experience.
Well, first of all, I think people hear the word racism and very often the default thought
(41:49):
is interpersonal experiences of racism and not thinking across different levels.
So number one, but I think that there's a conventional thought that the damage would
be psychological or emotional without thinking about the broader span of consequences that
there are implications of the range of types of racist experiences that people have, interpersonally
(42:11):
and within their day to day experiences in systems and structural environments that affect
cognitive development and social development and health, physical health is impacted as
Nate had talked about sleep.
The whole range of developmental outcomes that we study are beginning to be studied
in relation to a variety of forms of racism.
(42:33):
We shouldn't underestimate the pervasive impacts that it can have.
That is a hard question because we know how pervasive the effects have been.
So I would cheat and I would try to at least to come to mind, top of mind.
(42:58):
And one is the relationship between racism and economic violence.
Or when I talk about economic violence, again, drawing from the domestic violence definitions
of obstructions to economic mobility and opportunity, because in that way, we see the interface
(43:20):
between racism and poverty, you know, economic disinvestment in communities and all that
means for children's well-being, their health, the built environment.
So that's one thing.
But I think also importantly, how racism and its pervasiveness in American society through
media, through representations and education, the effect that that has had on one's identity
(43:46):
development, on young children's identity development, what we see that in terms of
youth and what we're seeing in terms of research where, you know, young black, young adults,
black youth feel less tied to a black identity than previous generations.
(44:08):
And what does that mean for young black children as they develop in a society that is still
characterized by anti-black racism when young black children do not have a sort of positive
racial identity?
And how do they then begin to understand the system that they're in and how do they learn
(44:30):
to navigate that system?
So the effects of racism not only on like racial identity for young children and their
whole identity, their personhood identity, but also its association with economic deprivation
and violence in the United States.
Those would be two things.
Yeah.
(44:50):
So I'm also going to cheat in answering this question because I think that the question
itself really dovetails nicely with both Dr. Slob and Dr. Sanders' answers to, you know,
what is the mindset shift we need to have in this sort of field?
And especially for those of us in neuroscience, I think it's really important to recognize
that we really haven't done that much in terms of trying to understand this sort of intersection
(45:16):
of racialization, socioeconomic deprivation, and violence that children are exposed to.
We spent a lot of time thinking about how, you know, environmental deprivation or exposure
to different threats to the environment might affect children in general.
We've done two decades of work looking at all of this.
But in terms of acknowledging or accepting that the experiences that, say, Black or white
(45:42):
children might have are different as a result of this sort of socio-historical or cultural
pressures that's been placed on the environments that people now grow up in, there's been very
limited to do with that.
And also going back to Dr. Sanders' point, and it's something that, you know, our work
is trying to move to.
We haven't done a good job of it.
(46:03):
We focused a lot on group differences and potential contributors to that.
But we haven't explored or begun to scratch the surface of what's happening within groups.
What might be different for individuals who are still exposed to these high levels of
racism but come from less socioeconomically disadvantaged areas?
What's the sort of impact on the brain?
(46:25):
And again, we know, again, it's been almost 100 years, maybe more, figuring out these
regions are really important for emotion, really important for different psychiatric
disorders.
And if we really want to have a full understanding of what the consequences of stress are, what
the consequences of racism are, and what the sort of brain basis for disorders are so we
can make these generalizable, equitable treatments for the entire citizenry of the United States,
(46:50):
we really need to figure out what's happening there, especially in childhood and how this
sort of intersection between racialization and these threat and deprivation, other aspects
of thinking about childhood development are intersecting to achieve those goals.
So I have a quick follow up question for Mavis.
Were you and when you were talking, did you say that children nowadays have a less of
(47:16):
attachment to their Black identity than in prior years, decades?
Can you talk more about that?
I just have to send you the poll.
And so I don't want to share the source, but I'm almost sure what the source is.
But once I share it, it's documented, you know, and so I will send that link.
But yes, they were just looking at across generations in terms of identification with
(47:44):
one sort of racial identity.
And we know that young people, I think younger than 30 have a different level of attachment
than previous generations.
And I will make sure that I send that study so that it can be added as a resource for
participants moving forward.
(48:05):
Yeah, that's really interesting and compelling.
I see a lot of little shocked emojis floating up, you know, with that.
So yes, please make sure that we all get that.
I have another question that I'm going to go to here.
OK, and I again, I'll throw this out to anyone.
(48:25):
How do you think we can ensure that future research contributes to this dismantling of
racial inequalities and of building those conditions for success?
How do you think future research?
What do you think future research needs to do?
And for everyone, that's a field, not just you all's research.
(48:49):
I would say that Nate has sort of laid it out.
Natalie has also laid it out in terms of, you know, group specific studies, in terms
of new questions and the development of new measures, the actual full use of the existing
(49:10):
measures that are out there around economic opportunity and the opportunity index scale
that Natalie was talking about using a variety of approaches, engaging with the community
to see about community questions.
What is important in those communities?
(49:31):
We talked about research policy practice partnerships and research.
So I think all of those, you know, those are at least four areas in terms of the approach.
Who has a say in the types of questions that we're asking and answering?
You know, what is what type of supports and funding are available for us to do these specific
(49:56):
kinds of studies and vehicles for publication?
And then for those who are in higher ed and academia, whether or not our institutions
of higher education are also valuing these and our promotion and tenure committees are
also valuing them.
And so that as people do this type of research, they're not fearful that they won't be able
(50:21):
to advance in their chosen field in academia.
So it really means that we have to start bringing all of these various parties into the conversation
because we know this research is important, that there are so many institutions and systems
that are in place that may limit people's opportunity to engage in this.
(50:48):
What I really love about you all as panelists is that you are all coming from different
perspectives, right?
So it's sort of really interdisciplinary.
And I think that's a strength.
When I talked about the ECRQ special issue, also it's interdisciplinary.
And I'm wondering, when we think about research for the future, I'm wondering if there could
(51:10):
be some way in which instead of approaching these questions as individual scientists,
can we approach things as a collaborative, right?
So that we can go deeper.
And I just think that that is such a good proactive way to allow the science to advance.
(51:34):
And I'm hoping that people can hear it, funders, federal agencies, I'm hoping that they can
hear this as well and really see the power of what we can learn when we have an interdisciplinary
group working on issues.
We have about five minutes.
I'm going to give you all each some time to do a takeaway message.
(51:58):
And so the takeaway message is please share a positive outcome or development in your
work related to communities, policies, and research that we can take with us.
So an idea that we can leave with us that will help us sort of feel empowered to learn
and grow and continue this work.
(52:19):
So what's a positive you want to leave with us?
Well, one positive that I have is that it seems to be a convergence that I see around
advocacy groups, policy groups, researchers that understand the importance of disentangling
(52:47):
the effects or highlighting the effects of systemic, the way systems and organizations
affect outcomes and not just reporting outcomes, but really trying to help people understand
the context in which those outcomes are produced.
(53:09):
And so that's moving us forward in the conversation.
So we're not reporting just, oh, there's a gap in academic achievement between black
children and youth and white children and youth.
We're talking about the institutional effects of underfunding education and relying on tax,
(53:34):
you know, property tax base or whatever, and the long-term effects of economic inequity,
educational and economic inequities to lead to these outcomes.
So the importance of contextualizing these findings so that we take our research gains
(53:55):
for the systems that produce them rather than the individuals I think is really important.
And it seems as though I feel as though there's much more support for that and almost an expectation
of that moving forward.
So we can hold on to that and push that.
That I think that that helps us to change and create those kinds of environments that
(54:19):
all children deserve and need to thrive.
So I love that.
What about Natalie and Nate?
What is your takeaway, your positive takeaway you want to leave us with?
Well, I feel very encouraged about the attention that we see across the different disciplines
thinking about early childhood to context.
I think there has been this shift that we've all observed over the past decade that has
(54:44):
made it almost an expectation to be thinking about across topics.
And I think that our data sources are catching up and we have more and more opportunities.
Say if we're researchers who rely on large federally funded cohort studies, for example,
(55:04):
they are collecting more information that allows us to study both risk factors but also
protective factors, which is an incredibly important future direction as well.
And so I think that we have increasing opportunities to take a very comprehensive look at social
environments that shape child development, both the positive and the negative, and also
(55:26):
to take a multilevel perspective, which we know is going to be really important for figuring
out upstream strategies for intervention.
Yeah.
Okay.
Great.
Great.
What about you, Nate?
Yeah, I think both of these are great.
And I wish I could just answer that, but I'll try to come up with something unique very
quickly.
I think for me, I'm not unaware of the sort of storied history that neuroscience has played
(55:52):
and the way in which people will use biology to justify a lot of, let's say, racist behavior
and the way that sort of, you know, structuralizing the institutions that we have.
It's been very, very encouraging to see more people pay attention to this and really get
the data to show that, you know, it's not this sort of ingrained brain thing.
(56:16):
It's the systems that we've developed, it's the structures that are in place that are
contributing to altered development and playing a role that it's doing.
I think, you know, to sort of increase recognition and having the data to really emphasize this
has just been really positive for me.
Yeah.
I tell you, I am so filled up with knowledge and encouraged as a scientist by this conversation
(56:40):
with you all.
I really feel as though we need more conversations like this.
We just scratched the surface here.
And it's been so lovely meeting you all.
And I want to say that I hope we can continue this conversation in meaningful ways.
And I want to thank you for being part of this panel and bringing your knowledge here
(57:04):
in this space.
And I thank you on behalf of Harvard and the Center on the Developing Child.
I thank you on behalf of Boston University and SEED.
And I look forward to continuing these conversations with you all.
The Brain Architects is a product of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
(57:27):
You can find us at developingchild.harvard.edu, where we will post any resources that were
discussed in this episode.
The next webinar in our Place Matters webinar series is on March 5th at 12 p.m. Eastern
Standard Time.
Stay tuned to our social channels for more details.
You can find us on Twitter at Harvard Center, Facebook at Center Developing Child, and Instagram
(57:51):
at Developing Child Harvard.
Your music is Brain Power by Miele Collective.
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