The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene an ad hoc committee of experts to conduct a consensus study on early relational health (ERH). The committee will make recommendations on future directions for research, policy, and practices and recommend strategies and actions to translate basic and applied research findings to advance ERH across health care, childcare, education, and other community settings. In conducting its work, the committee will examine clinical, program, and research trends related to this paradigm shift that focus on ERH for infant, child, and family wellbeing.
The committee will address the following questions:
1. What evidence from family engagement and place-based community initiatives can guide effective strategies to strengthen early relational health? How can these initiatives incorporate the causal impacts of the conditions of daily life—including social and economic factors such as housing, food security, employment, education, and community environment—on child and family health and well-being?
2. What practices and implementation strategies best promote early relational health and community resilience through cross-sector early childhood systems change, including approaches that support effective scale-up and sustainability?
3. Which federal and state policies, programs, and research priorities are needed to advance and sustain early relational health?
The ad hoc committee will be appointed according to National Academies’ procedures to ensure balance, objectivity, and independence. To the extent possible, the committee of approximately 14 members, 2 of whom will be parent/caregiver and family leaders, will include experts with clinical, research, and lived experience. Key study members may possess the following expertise: parent and caregivers; dynamics of intra-family processes; child health care transformation; infant and early childhood mental health and care/education; early childhood system and community; relational health; Medicaid and Maternal Child Health policy; health care systems, including pediatric primary care and community health centers; health care economists/health care financing; cultural and evolutionary anthropology; sociologists of the interrelations between community/national contexts and family dynamics; population health, child development, and family/child survey researchers; strategic public health communication; education; neurodevelopment; and child development/early childhood care providers; early-life adversity, resilience, and health across the lifespan; and cultural variability in family relationships and child development.