- Multimedia
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NEW VIDEO
Building Adult Capabilities to Improve Child Outcomes: A Theory of Change
This 5-minute video depicts the Frontiers of Innovation community's theory of change for achieving breakthrough outcomes for vulnerable children and families. It describes the need to focus on building the capabilities of caregivers and strengthening the communities that together form the environment of relationships essential to children's lifelong learning, health, and behavior. View video >>
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EXECUTIVE FUNCTION RESOURCES
InBrief: Executive Function: Skills for Life and Learning
Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive functioning, a group of skills that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, and revise plans as necessary. This edition of the InBrief series explains how these lifelong skills develop, what can disrupt their development, and how supporting them pays off in school and life. View video >>
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MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION
"Mapping Brain Connectivity"
The new field of “connectomics” aims to show how brains behave at a level not previously possible—examining how entire brains are wired together, how wiring changes as brains grow up, and how interactions with the external world affect this wiring. In this narrated, 15-minute multimedia presentation, postdoctoral fellow Bobby Kasthuri shares some of the results and insights from his work at the Lichtman Lab at Harvard University, using images and videos that show three-dimensional recreations of actual neural connections in the brain. He also discusses the future direction of this work in helping to understand how early adverse experiences affect connectivity. View multimedia presentation >>
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VIDEO SERIES
Three Core Concepts in Early Development
1. Experiences Build Brain Architecture | 2. Serve & Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry | 3. Toxic Stress Derails Healthy Development
This three-part video series from the Center and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child depicts how advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics now give us a much better understanding of how early experiences are built into our bodies and brains, for better or for worse. View videos & read more about this series >>
- Publications
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NEW WORKING PAPER
The Science of Neglect:
The Persistent Absence of Responsive Care Disrupts the Developing Brain
Extensive biological and developmental research over the past 30 years has generated substantial evidence that young children who experience severe deprivation or significant neglect—defined broadly as the ongoing disruption or significant absence of caregiver responsiveness—bear the burdens of a range of adverse consequences. This new Working Paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child explains why significant deprivation is so harmful in the earliest years of life and why effective interventions are likely to pay significant dividends in better long-term outcomes in learning, health, and parenting of the next generation. Read more & download PDF >>
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NEW BRIEF
InBrief: Early Childhood Mental Health
The science of child development shows that the foundation for sound mental health is built early in life, as early experiences—which include children’s relationships with parents, caregivers, relatives, teachers, and peers—shape the architecture of the developing brain. Disruptions in this developmental process can impair a child’s capacities for learning and relating to others, with lifelong implications. This two-page summary—part of the InBrief series—explains why, many costly problems for society, ranging from the failure to complete high school to incarceration to homelessness, could be dramatically reduced if attention were paid to improving children’s environments of relationships and experiences early in life. Read more & download PDF >>
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Building the Brain's "Air Traffic Control" System
Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive functioning, a group of skills that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, and revise plans as necessary. This Working Paper explains how these lifelong skills develop, what can disrupt their development, and how supporting them pays off in school and life. Read more & download PDF >>
View all resources >>
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- News & Events
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- Student Opportunities
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Summer Internship Opportunity for Harvard Undergraduate
The Center for Public Policy at INSPER-Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa in Brazil is looking to take on a Harvard undergraduate student as a summer intern. The candidate will participate in a research project on child development, utilizing longitudinal data from a sample of 5000 people who are from Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The work involves using databases, producing statistics and building tables. The candidate will also help organize the INSPER session of the Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância’s Executive Leadership Course, which takes place in São Paulo, Brazil from June 24-26, 2013.
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INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITY
Mapping Brain Connectivity
The new field of “connectomics” aims to understand how brains behave at a level not previously possible—examining how entire brains are wired together, how wiring changes as brains grow up, and how interactions with the external world affect this wiring. The Lichtman Lab at Harvard University has pioneered tools to potentially map every connection in a complete brain and started to map the connectome in mouse brains. Now, in collaboration with the Center on the Developing Child, and as part of the Conte Center at Harvard, the lab is recruiting students to contribute to this mapping effort.
Read more & find out how to apply >>
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- Faculty Spotlights
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Faculty Spotlight: Theresa Betancourt
When humanitarian crises hit around the world, nongovernmental organizations rush into the fray, intensively focused on urgent survival needs, not necessarily on longer-term impacts that may take an even greater toll on the country and its citizens. Theresa Betancourt, a Center-affiliated faculty member who studies children in adversity and has worked alongside NGOs, wants to help them see that farther horizon: Combining short-term survival efforts with attention to children’s developmental needs only magnifies the long-range benefits for individuals and societies. Read more >>
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Faculty Spotlight: Takao Hensch
As a young neurobiologist, Takao Hensch, Ph.D., started exploring classic questions of brain development by studying the visual systems of mice—something most scientists considered a waste of time. “What could you possibly learn from mice?” they asked, noting the animals’ nocturnal nature and horrendous eyesight. Twenty years and countless lab mice later, Hensch, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard and professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), has answered skeptics again and again with significant breakthroughs in studying how experiences shape the developing brain at the molecular level.
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Faculty Spotlight: Jordan Smoller
Jordan Smoller, M.D., Sc.D., a psychiatric geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital, has spent his research career identifying the role of genes and experience in patients’ risk for developing psychiatric disorders. Now, the professor at Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard School of Public Health has been named the first science director of the Center’s Science of Health and Development Initiative. By creating a hub for multi-disciplinary research on child development, he hopes to spur research and new ways of thinking that ultimately could inform innovations in public health policy and practice. Read more >>
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Science of Early Childhood
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that early influences—whether positive or negative—are critical to the development of children’s brains and their lifelong health. More >>
Innovation
The Center's mission is to leverage science to enhance child well-being through innovations in policy and practice and to translate advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genomics, and the behavioral and social sciences into creative, new strategies for action. More >>
Foundations of Lifelong Health
A vital and productive society with a prosperous and sustainable future is built on a foundation of healthy child development. When developing biological systems occur in an environment of positive early experiences, children have a greater chance to thrive and to grow up to be healthy adults. More >>
Understanding Intervention
Early childhood program evaluation studies indicate that it is possible to improve outcomes for vulnerable children as well as to generate positive social and economic benefits to society. More >>
Global Child Development
In an explicit effort to build an integrated international approach to child survival, health, and development in the earliest years of life, the Center has launched the Global Children’s Initiative as the centerpiece of its global child health and development agenda. More >>
