Understanding Racism's Impact on Child Development: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States

Contents Podcast Additional Resources Transcript   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.  Additional Resources Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development Moving Upstream: Confronting Racism to Open Up Children’s Potential Priorities for Child Trends’ Applied Research Agenda on Black Children and Families – Child Trends A Bibliographic Tool on Protective Community Resources for Children and Youth – Child Trends Black Children and Youth Can Benefit From Focused Research on Protective Community Resources – Child Trends Black Adolescents Are More Likely to Flourish in Neighborhoods Featuring Four Key Amenities – Child Trends Transcript   Cameron Seymour-Hawkins: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at 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 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, Doctors Stephanie Curenton, Nathaniel Harnett, Mavis Sanders, and Natalie 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 work toward solutions 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 Tassy Warren, the Center’s Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer, who will set the stage for our conversation. Tassy Warren: Hello. 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 a regular to the Center on the Developing Child, thank you for being here today. 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 in 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 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 of children and families. And thank you to everyone who submitted questions when registering for this event. We received hundreds of submitted questions, so 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 are submitted or we would be here for days. But we were really intrigued going through all of the questions 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 Curenton, who we are incredibly lucky to have leading this conversation for us today. Dr. Curenton 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 CEED. CEED’S research and initiatives serve to inform policies that promote equity and justice for 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 Harnett, Dr. Mavis Sanders, and Dr. Natalie Slopen. Dr. Harnett is Director of the Neurobiology of Affective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital and an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Harnett’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, where she leads in 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. Slopen is an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Slopen 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. Curenton share more about herself and kick off our conversation. Stephanie Curenton: Hello, everyone. I am honored to be here to moderate this conversation and to represent CEED as well as Boston University. As Tassy was saying, our work at CEED specifically focuses on understanding how racism impacts Black children’s growth and development and ways in which families use their cultural assets and social capital to protect themselves from the harm of racism. 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 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, CEED, along with our partners at Equity Research Action Coalition, 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. 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 Three Model, for which I’m a coauthor with Dr. Iheoma Iruka. It presents new ideas about how communities, policies, programs and funding streams might confront and dismantle inequalities and build a stronger future for all of us. But we’re here today because there is 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 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 healthy development. And with that, I’m so excited to be moderating this conversation with...