The Nurturing Care Framework: From Policies to Parents

When most people think of early childhood development, what comes to mind is preprimary school learn- ing; similarly, when they think about how best to ensure a child turns out well, their thoughts turn to ado- lescents. The FrameWorks Institute in Washington, DC, calls this “aging up,” a phenomenon that has been demonstrated as a bias in policy and public thinking in several countries, including South Africa (Richter, Tomlinson, Watt, Hunt, & Lindland, 2019). Yet it is the earliest period of life, from conception to two to three years of age, that most strongly regulates our trajectory across the course of our lives (Shonkoff, Richter, van der Gaag, & Bhutta, 2012) and that influences how children cope with early formal learning and the challenges of adolescence.

This earliest period of life is less visible because it plays out in the privacy of homes and child care centers, and it is most directly influenced by the quality of relationships between young children and their parents and caregivers. Until quite recently it wasn’t clear what the issues during this period were and how they could be addressed (Shawar & Shiffman, 2017). However, the 2017 publication of the Lancet series Ad- vancing Early Childhood Development: From Science to Scale accelerated a growing convergence between scientific evidence and political commitment on the importance of addressing poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, starting at the beginning of life.

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