Author: Nelson Rosario

The moment when a parent discovers their child has been waiting months for a therapy appointment that might never come is one that frequently comes up in discussions with public health researchers. It’s not overly dramatic. It’s silent. The voicemail left by a school counselor is not answered. a recommendation for a provider located two counties away. A child is clearly struggling while sitting in a classroom, and the adults nearby lack the resources to assist him. That is the true nature of America’s children’s mental health crisis, which is manifesting in states like Pennsylvania at a scale that necessitates…

When discussing child development in Pakistan, a certain number frequently comes up. 41 percent. Compared to what they might have become with full health, full education, and a truly fair start, that is how productive a child born there today can anticipate being by the time they turn eighteen. It’s an impressive figure. The worst part is that during the messy, formative, invisible years between birth and age five, a large portion of that gap quietly opens up before a child ever enters a classroom. The chair of the Early Childhood Peace Consortium, Dr. Rima Salah, has spent years witnessing…

If you walk into any government health center in rural Punjab on a Tuesday morning, you’ll probably find a small group of women sitting in a half-circle and listening, some of them with infants strapped to their backs and others who are very pregnant. A laminated card is being held up by a facilitator. A mother and child were drawn on it. The speaker is not a physician. It has taken years of research, two ministries, and one international agency to translate what she teaches into a language that local families can truly use. She is a trained community worker.…

The fact that no one recorded it in a policy document for the majority of recorded history is quietly remarkable. Communities took care of young children by feeding them, teaching them to walk, and reading them stories before bed. neighbors, older siblings, mothers, and grandmothers. The village, as the term was originally used. There was no system in place. It was simply life. In nineteenth-century Europe, the transition to something more formal began to take shape. Kindergartens started to spring up all over Germany, and day nurseries started to open in places like Mexico City, Calcutta, São Paulo, and London.…

Somewhere in Beirut, a child is learning how to control her anger before she has even learned to read. The room is small, underfunded, and hidden inside a camp for Palestinian refugees. The program taking place in that room is a part of something much bigger than it appears. It links to a group of scientists, educators, and development experts who have spent years making the case—which sounds almost too optimistic to be true—that peace can be taught and that it must begin at a young age through a network of research and silent resolve. The Early Childhood Peace Consortium,…

When scientists, child psychologists, and educators from all over the world quietly concur that something is happening to children that no one fully understands yet, a certain kind of urgency fills a room, even a virtual one. The International Psychological Forum “Child in the Digital World,” an annual event that has quietly evolved into one of the more serious attempts to comprehend what digital life is doing to the generation growing up entirely inside it, is surrounded by this sentiment. The Russian Psychological Society, the Faculty of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and the Federal Scientific Center for Psychological…