Serve & Return: Building Healthy Relationships for Young Children and Their Caregivers
Listen to a conversation on how serve and return has shaped our understanding of early relationships and the importance of supporting caregivers.
Co-Executive Director of the Center on the Developing Child and podcast host Tassy Warren is joined by the Center’s Faculty Director, Dr. Stephanie Jones, and Dr. Junlei Li, Saul Zaentz Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to explore the evolution of serve and return and what we’ve learned about the influence of relationships on early childhood development over the past 20 years.
Drs. Jones and Li share how the concept has helped shift our understanding of the importance of early relationships and how that thinking has evolved into more recent concepts such as “early relational health.” The conversation also looks beyond individual relationships to consider the broader ecosystem in which relationships develop—including the environments that shape caregivers’ ability to build strong, responsive relationships with young children—and how we can better support healthy relationships in policy and practice.
