Early relational health is a paradigm that integrates science-based and experience-informed ideas, values, and practices which elevate the significance of the earliest attentive, responsive, nurturing, and reciprocal caregiver-child interactions in promoting children’s healthy development and well-being.
This report outlines the actionable implications of 10 foundational principles of the early relational health paradigm:
- Nurturing caregiver-child interactions establish strong, meaningful, and enduring or consistent relationships and provide immediate and long-term benefits for both young children and their caregivers.
- Simple and everyday human interactions are “good enough” early relational experiences.
- Research and practice are strengthened by integrating family experience and cultural wisdom into the science of early childhood
development. - Connectedness, belonging, and mattering are essential for parents.
- The early relational health paradigm emphasizes the strengths and resources of parents and young children.
- A social-ecological perspective enables a comprehensive focus on conditions, circumstances, and characteristics that advance or impede early relational health.
- A broad range of helping professionals and community members can provide experiences which promote early relational health.
- Collaborative decision-making and power-sharing between families and early relational health professionals can lead to better outcomes for children and parents.
- Early relational health embraces diversity of practices and knowledge and resists reductionism about human development.
- A society built on respectful and equitable relationships is a society in which all young children and their families can thrive.