Share Early Childhood Matters

Michael: While parenthood is as old as humankind itself, the study of how it changes us as human beings—biologically, socially, psychologically, and more—is relatively nascent. Why is that?

Helena: We’ve known a lot about the infant brain since around the 1980s, but we’ve only studied the parental brain for maybe the last 10 years. I think it’s because that’s just how society has treated parents—we haven’t really paid attention to them.

You’re seen as an adult becoming a parent, and you’re expected to get on with it. The thinking has been, This is a normative experience that everybody goes through, so why would we even begin to ask any questions about it? There’s been a dismissal. The purpose of my lab is to address and study the longitudinal nature of parenthood. Becoming and being a parent is a developmental process. A time of experience-based brain plasticity and it starts during pregnancy. To me, it’s fascinating to observe parents’ attentional processing—what’s most relevant to them, what they attend to, what they’re engaged with. There’s just a natural curiosity there that drives me to really understand the nature of parent behaviour and social interactions.

Why is your research group called The Before and After Baby Lab?

It took us a long time to come up with the name and the logo, and, actually, it was a group process. The name encompasses that you’re a parent before you have a baby. Much of the parental processing that happens postnatally has antecedents in pregnancy. You don’t become a parent overnight with the birth of your child, or however a child comes to you. In reality, there are a series of psychological and biological changes happening that prepare an individual for the transition to parenthood.

Unfortunately, up until now, there is generally a disregard for what is going on in pregnancy for the mother. When we think about the prenatal parent, we focus exclusively on how the baby’s developing. We’re finding out what size of fruit the baby’s going to be week-by-week, but we’re not asking the same questions of the mother’s own development. What gets me out of bed in the morning is: What’s that process?

There are many parenting interventions that are incredibly successful, but the majority are given to people after they’ve had their children. At The BABL, our research is designed to find out who might be at risk or most vulnerable before the baby arrives. Our goal is to show the importance of introducing services ahead of time so they can have the maximum impact on not only the mom, but also on the child and the broader family system. We’re learning so much about how the brain is changing during pregnancy. We know that neurobiology and psychology go hand-in-hand. Let’s think about that as part of a woman’s routine prenatal healthcare. This is a time for actually sitting down and having conversations with women about how they’re anticipating their transition to parenthood.

This idea that becoming a parent is gradual rather than instantaneous feels surprising yet obvious. Are there other prevalent misconceptions about the developmental process of parenthood?

I’m not a fan of the concept of “maternal instinct.” It gets used in both positive and negative ways, but usually when it’s brought up to me, it’s referring to this inherent motivational drive that leads somebody to become a parent and drives all of their behaviour as though they have no control over it. And it’s often thought that every mother should have a maternal instinct, and you’re not a good parent if you lack it.

Share

What does science have to say about maternal instinct?

Science is telling us that there’s a lot of variability. A key point of the research we do in The BABL is looking for individual differences; every single person is transitioning to parenthood with different needs and different expectations. You can talk to multiple parents and they’re all going to tell you that they felt like a parent at different times. Some of them didn’t feel like a parent during pregnancy but the feeling came online postnatally. There is no hard and fast rule.

We know that there are regions of the brain that are important to motivation, particularly those involved in how we process what is positive or rewarding. When mothers are looking at photographs of their baby, particularly—and not surprisingly—if their baby is smiling, their brain lights up like a Christmas tree. We can use that information as a marker to think about: What are the situations where we might see dampened reward-processing or dampened motivation in a mother? But that’s still not getting at this romantic idea of maternal instinct.

Reframing maternal instinct is very important because the current framing sets people up to fail—and that’s what really bothers me about it. It implies there’s a right way of parenting and that the right way will just switch on. In truth, there’s no minimum level of instinct that means that you’re going to be a good parent.

Is this issue about “instinct” also a problem for dads?

The same applies to fathers. If you make a decision to become a parent, regardless of your sex or your gender identity, you may have strong feelings about it, or you may not. You may need more time with the baby to “feel” like a dad.

We’ve got to move away from trying to segregate mothers from fathers in our representations of parents, because we’re doing a disservice to families and to child development. A lot of dads are not very involved in terms of the prenatal experiences because of the way our health systems are set up. When a person is pregnant, they become the focus of attention. People overlook the roles of partners and other caregivers, but they’re going through their own process as well. And as far as maternal or parental instinct goes, I think we have come up with a new term.

What phrase could we replace it with?

“Maternal psychology” or “Paternal psychology.” We should be asking: What’s the underlying psychology of motherhood or fatherhood? That gives you more opportunity to think flexibly about individual differences and how motivation can exist on a continuum.

What would you say is the most influential factor in terms of how quickly or how completely people learn to be parents?

There’s really nothing as powerful as interaction, nothing like that experience of spending time with your child postpartum that’s going to reinforce those changes that are happening over time. But so much of the prenatal period is priming the maternal brain, and I would say, the non-maternal brain too, in terms of readiness. There are lots of signals and cues in the environment letting you know that the baby is coming, even if you’re not gestationally carrying the baby.

Could you tell me about one of those prenatal signals or cues?

One area we have been focused on is fetal movement. Fetal movement is a communicative signal from the baby telling you not only that it’s alive and it’s moving, but also that it’s coming. In The BABL, we looked at fetal movement in terms of the broader maternal psychology and neuroscience. We conducted electroencephalogram (EEG) assessments on pregnant women to gauge their neural responses when looking at infants’ distress faces and infants’ neutral faces. We found that the women who had had a more active fetus in utero had a larger neural response to the infant distress face than those with less fetal movement. We have interpreted that to mean that mothers who have more active fetuses are paying more attention to infant distress as they’ve been primed more by the baby’s movement, which suggests that there could be a link between maternal psychology and the maternal brain within the context of fetal movement.

Babies kick and twist in the womb to communicate, but once they’re born, they cry, among other cues. You’ve done a fair amount of research on parental response to infant crying. Can you tell me more about it?

I think a baby crying is inherently powerful. One amazing thing about baby cries is that they propagate across space. You don’t have to be in the same room as your baby crying; you could hear them faintly. Either way, there’s a distinct signal from the baby that says “I need you” and it really pulls you towards caring for the baby. But the signal is not just about hearing the cry. It’s also about trying to interpret the cry. In other words, what does that cry mean? Is my baby hungry or getting tired and do they need to sleep? Before we go in and pick up the baby, or try to nurse the baby, we go through a series of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive processes. You watch an interaction between a mom and a baby, and you see how quickly a mom is responding to her baby, but the reality is that so much has gone on in just microseconds of time.

How does studying a mother’s reaction to her baby’s cries have the potential to help parents?

It gives us an opportunity to say, let’s look at mechanisms that are important to perception, to attention, and to cognitive interpretations, and then to think about their intersection with mental health. If the mechanisms are working differently in a mother with a mental health condition than in a mom without one, we can use that knowledge to inform interventions. That said, it’s important to note that there are many other factors to consider. That’s what makes it complicated to study parenting, because you can’t control every single variable. Everybody comes to parenthood with different expectations and anxieties and levels of excitement. We all have our prior experiences with our own parents that we bring into our parenting relationship. We inherently lose a lot by thinking about parents as a group and not thinking about the unique trajectory of each parent.

Your own daughter is five now. Do you share any of your research with her?

I talk a lot with her about the brain. It was one of the first organs of the body she learned about. She has a brain cookie cutter and we make brain cookies and play dough cookies of the brain.

Does she have a favourite part of the brain?

I don’t think she has one yet. I’m just happy that she knows it’s there and it’s important.

This interview was originally published on Early Childhood Matters.
If you are curious about the neuroscience of parenthood check out this collection.

You can also explore the idea of parenthood as a developmental stage through our podcast Birth of a Parent. New conversations arrive every Wednesday so please follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts!

Cody Gakpo, a forward for the Dutch men’s national football team, and his partner Noa Van der Bij announced the heartbreaking loss of their unborn child Elijah Raphael Gakpo mid-tournament. Norwegian defender Leo Ostigard supported his partner Aurora Eidmann virtually as she gave birth to their first child. And Belgian winger Jérémy Doku flew to London to be with his wife Shireen Erin Lyannda Raymond as she delivered their son, Praise.

Gakpo received wide support for his loss, and Ostigard’s fatherhood made joyous headlines. But Doku’s choice to briefly leave the team sparked controversy. Even as the Belgian football authorities and his teammates rallied behind him, an announcer on French television criticised him. The broadcaster immediately apologised in the face of a massive global backlash. Still, the episode demonstrated just how deep-rooted and harmful fatherhood stereotypes can be even in 2026.

The image of the distant or bumbling father pervades our culture. “The bond between man and baby, which I find beautiful, intimate and revealing, is barely depicted in iconography or art history,” Argentinian writer and poet Andrés Neuman said in Early Childhood Matters’ 2026 issue. “When it does appear, it is usually from a perspective of prejudice or comedy… We [men] seem to have considered politics, football or economics to be interesting enough, but feeding our child or changing nappies is trivial.”

Men generally, and elite athletes in particular, have been traditionally portrayed as creatures driven by testosterone. Says Lee Gettler, director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame: “Listen to sports podcasts, or watch shows that have anything to do with men and violence, and you will hear testosterone being thrown around as the driving force behind how men interact with one another.”

But it may be time to retire this trope: Gettler’s research has shown that becoming a father is linked to testosterone levels going down.

This evidence — that becoming a father changes men fundamentally — creates fertile ground for what the poet Neuman calls ‘a rebellion against inherited principles of fatherhood’. Men like Doku are helping push that rebellion into public view, from one of the world’s most watched spectacles.

A goal for maternal health

This World Cup hasn’t just been about fathers, though. Monterrey, a city in Mexico that hosted four World Cup games, has become part of a movement that uses the global reach of football to… help new mothers.

At the heart of the movement is FC Mother, a ‘football meets maternal health’ platform founded by former Palestinian footballer and entrepreneur Morad Fareed. The idea is simple. Football is by far the world’s most popular sport, played in 211 countries and territories and loved by over six billion fans. Every city in the world has a football club. What if this vast community could be mobilised to promote maternal health?

Maternal and neonatal disorders, such as chronic stress during pregnancy and pre-term birth, are the single largest cause of lost life years in the world: 194 million life years, every year, Fareed wrote for us. That’s more than the life years lost to heart disease, stroke, or cancer. To promote the health of new mothers and children, FC Mother engages football clubs to invite pregnant women to a special event where they can meet other pregnant women and mothers in their city.

“At these sessions, we ask pregnant women, ‘Who’s on your team?’ Layer one is public health support – midwives, community health workers, doulas. Then layer two is friends and family – your sister, your partner, your mother-in law, whoever. We ask, ‘What are the things you would love assistance with?’ It’s very practical, it’s things like, ‘I need some help around the house, I need some childcare, I need a ride.’”

FC Mother trialled this idea with the Brazilian football club Flamengo, which has nearly 50 million fans. The results of the pilot trial with 79 women were encouraging: 97% of participants reported feeling less anxious and less stressed during pregnancy; 100% reported feeling less lonely; 90% reported feeling a lot more prepared for motherhood; family and friends completed 41% of the suggested support actions for mothers; and the programme generated 3 healthy life years per mother enrolled.

After Monterrey, FC Mother plans to expand to other FIFA World Cup host cities in Canada and the USA. Over the next five years, these cities will compete to generate the most assists, funds, and healthy life years for mothers as part of a ‘World Cup of Healing’ competition.

Share

How football can make the world better for children

Football could also be part of addressing a children’s health emergency: childhood obesity. The WHO estimates that over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight in 2022, including 160 million who were living with obesity. Aside from its physical health fallout, obesity has adverse psychosocial impacts. It affects school performance and quality of life, compounded by stigma, discrimination, and bullying.

Introducing young children to football could help. Researchers have found that playing the sport positively affects body composition in children, increasing lean body mass and reducing fat mass. (Parents and caregivers can play a vital role here: children are more likely to participate in physical activities when they perceive their parents as being physically active.)

There’s also evidence that football training can help improve cognitive skills in children, including attention, inhibitory control, and working memory. The challenge, as we saw in this newsletter’s previous edition, is that in spite of its well-documented benefits, children in many parts of the world are spending less time playing outdoors than ever.

This is where interventions like Football for Schools, run by the sport’s global governing body FIFA which has touched the lives of 31 million children come in. Football for Schools aims to use the universal appeal of football to popularise physical education; help children learn life skills and become active and healthy citizens; and promote gender equality, peace, unity and social integration. Consider India, where earlier this year Football for Schools achieved nationwide coverage in partnership with the Indian government and the All India Football Federation. The programme in India places strong emphasis on inclusion and promoting participation of girls and children from rural and aspirational districts.

In Kenya, for nearly four decades, the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) has used football as a tool to encourage co-operation, raise self-esteem, and promote physical and environmental health in the young people of Mathare — one of Kenya’s largest clusters of informal settlements. MYSA’s work has been particularly transformative for Mathare’s girls. In 1992, MYSA launched the first football league for girls in Kenya with eight teams. Today, over 500 girls’ teams take part in the MYSA grassroots football league across 22 informal settlements in the capital Nairobi.

On July 19, one team will win the FIFA World Cup, football’s ultimate prize. But the sport’s greatest triumph could well lie beyond the stadiums of Monterrey, Miami, and Toronto — in maternity wards, school playgrounds, and city streets.

Our reader at, founder of Cara, a French organisation working towards a care society, had this to say about our previous issue:

“This is really inspiring! Love seeing the threads that recur across different countries. Is there data on the Majlisna initiative durably improving the rates of play among children in Abu Dhabi, and nationwide across the UAE?”

Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Mélina. While we don’t have countrywide data yet, early results show promise. As our piece states:

“The number of children using the space tripled in just over four weeks, and those children spent almost twice as much time playing. We observed a 42% reduction in people using their devices, and a significant increase in connections across generations as the interventions encouraged more family members to gather, including teenagers and older community members.”

We will definitely be on the lookout for more data and keep you posted.

Have a question or comment about this newsletter? Drop us a line below and we will get back to you.

These were all ideas born out of the ‘Bureau of Re-Funification’, a children-led intervention to reimagine public spaces in Washington, D.C., with fun and play at the centre.

As part of the weeklong intervention in 2013, a group of children were taken to the city’s historic Union Station and asked to take notes on its environment. Their most common complaint: the space wasn’t welcoming for them. When asked who they felt the space was meant for, one child pointed to the adults in the room. “You guys! It’s all made for business people. Not us.”

At the end of the week, the children decided to don superhero costumes and brighten up the sidewalks near the station with chalk drawings. Then, something wonderful happened, recounted narrative strategist , co-founder of the Harry Potter Alliance that co-designed the intervention, featured in Early Childhood Matters’ 2014 issue. A group of older children from around the world, who were in the city for an educational camp, became curious and decided to join the fun.

Soon, the sidewalks around Union Station were cheerfully decorated with the word ‘love’ in many different languages. Passing adults stopped and smiled. “Our kids were giddy with excitement,” said Slack, “because they saw that they had opened up a space that positively changed others.”

When I first read this story from the ECM archives, I immediately loved it because it showed that the work of building child-friendly cities isn’t a newly minted trend but goes back decades. In fact these early stories of inspiration helped the Van Leer Foundation to create its Urban95 initiative, which turns 10 this year and has influenced play and care in almost 500 cities.

^{The Bureau of Re-Funification began a conversation about how cities might be made more welcoming for both kids and the elderly, with comfortable places to pass time, and opportunities to have fun. Photo: Harry Potter Alliance.}

Play is essential, but children are spending less time outdoors than ever

Play is crucial for mental and physical development in early childhood. Children learn to think, remember, and solve problems through play. Imaginative play is not just about having fun — it allows children to explore the boundaries of their imagination. Play teaches children to express their feelings, understand emotions, develop empathy, and communicate with confidence. Group play helps children learn negotiation and cooperation, understand perspectives, and resolve conflicts. Caregivers also benefit from welcoming, playful public spaces that help them bond with their children and boost their psychosocial wellbeing.

Subscribe now

In Early Childhood Matters’ 1999 issue, educator S Anandalakshmy wrote what has become my favourite ode to play:

“The fear of tigers that eat up children
Is conquered when the child becomes a tiger,
Growling and prowling.

In the far corner of the room cuddling a doll,
Playing at baby and mother,
Both roles at once,
Understanding love.

Being a bus driver,
taking people on
Giving tickets and taking change
Stopping for oil
Steering away into the future.”

While play in any setting is powerful, outdoor play is especially important for the mental and physical health of children, parents and caregivers. And yet, in many parts of the world, children are spending less time outdoors than ever, says UNICEF. Studies have found that girls, children from racial or ethnic minorities, and children who live in urban areas may be less likely to spend time outdoors.

Lack of safe outdoor spaces means civic organisations and city planners across the world are increasingly grappling with a question that has profound implications for the future: how do we make our cities playful for children and caregivers?

Strengthening intergenerational connections: The Abu Dhabi model

In Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority is faced with a serious, countrywide challenge: 80% of children in the UAE engage in less than one hour of physical activity per week. For context, the UK’s National Health Service recommends that children under 5 years should get at least three hours of physical activity per day.

The Authority’s response was a project tailored for play at the city’s Al Falah Village Center, which included a mosque, a small park, and a retail plaza. Initial surveys showed that only 15% of visitors to the centre were children aged 8 years or younger, and caregivers spent only 3% of their time interacting with their children. “[We] focused on making the outdoor space more appealing to families,” wrote the project team in Early Childhood Matters’ 2025 issue.

For instance, picnic tables were added to encourage communal behaviour as people across generations shared food, drinks, and play activities. Movable play equipment, such as foam blocks, fostered independence in toddlers. And flexible cycling and sports equipment, like movable football goals and floor paintings of lines for children to follow on their bikes, inspired more playful physical activity.

^{Families playing at the Al Falah intervention. Photo: Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority.}

The learnings from Al Falah became the foundation for Majlisna (from the Emirati concept of the Majlis, a space for family and communities to gather), a programme to transform public spaces across Abu Dhabi. Following its success at Al Falah, the Majlisna model has been rolled out at the Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC). “Seeing children laughing, running, and exploring together in these spaces fills me with hope and excitement for the future we are building,” says Her Excellency Sana bint Mohamed Suhail, Minister of Family and Director General of the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority.

Also read How a park in Aqaba, Jordan, was reimagined to foster social connection and mental health through play

When playing is healing: the Bangladesh playbook

Initiatives like the Bureau of Re-Funification and Majlisna speak to the transformative potential of play in urban environments.

That’s the reality for children and parents of the Rohingya community in Bangladesh who took refuge there after fleeing their country Myanmar amid unrest and uncertainty. Over a million Rohingya live in camps in Bangladesh, the majority of them in the city of Cox’s Bazar. Over half of them are children under the age of 18. Marginalised and torn away from their home country, many among this population live with severe physical and mental distress.

The standard first response to humanitarian crises is to cater to urgent physical needs — food, water, hygiene, and sanitation. But Rohingya children also bear the imprint of trauma that calls for sustained psychological interventions.

This is where BRAC, a humanitarian organisation, comes in with its Humanitarian Play Lab (HPL) model. Since 2015, BRAC has collaborated with the LEGO Foundation to promote play as a learning tool in Bangladesh. This approach can be particularly therapeutic for children in fragile settings, where they are exposed to violence and poverty, wrote the BRAC team in Early Childhood Matters’ 2019 issue.

Share

The HPL model is designed to build children’s resilience in vulnerable settings; nurture spontaneity; and foster a sense of community using traditional games, rhymes, and activities. Through conversations with the Rohingya community, BRAC discovered that traditions and cultural norms played a strong role in their everyday lives. It identified three cultural pillars that could play a major role in healing:

• Folk rhymes (Kabbiya); community members felt that the words and rhythms tapped into the primal core of the children.

• Traditional games and physical play activities, and

• Arts and crafts, such as culturally significant artwork, floral patterns, and motifs that gave the displaced children the feeling that home is never far away.

Positive results with the children involved in the HPL model, as well the increasing focus on the model by large-scale donor organisations, showed that the model has the potential to be scaled in different humanitarian contexts.

Each of these stories carries a common message: Play is a pillar of strong intergenerational relationships and a child’s fundamental right. Protecting that right requires innovation and compassion from adults. After all, fun isn’t just child’s play.

How does your culture nurture play? Select responses will be featured in a future issue of this newsletter.

Also see

• ‘Transforming Rotterdam’s schoolyards’ by Ian Mostert

• ‘Play is all about allowing natural curiosity and exploration’: an interview with environmental designer Ram Eisenberg

• ‘Spaces that make children want to play’ by Tim Gill

• ‘Playful learning landscapes’ by Helen Shwe Hadani and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

• ‘The Never Stop Playing’ campaign by TED and Lego Foundation

The Early Childhood Matters website now comes with AI-powered search. Check it out today to explore more questions about play and other topics.

In 2005, in the wake of the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami, Early Childhood Matters published a special issue on the wellbeing of children in crisis zones. Two decades later, nearly half a billion children across the world today live in areas affected by conflict, doubling from the 1990s. Between 2010 and 2024, the number of children displaced by violent conflict had nearly tripled, from 17 million to 48 million. And a billion children are at ‘extremely high risk’ from climate change.

Margaret McCallin, guest editor of the 2005 issue, had decades of experience working with children caught up in conflict zones. In a powerful editorial, she pressed for a critical shift in programmes designed for such settings — from a ‘needs-based’ approach to a ‘rights-based’ one.

A needs-based approach treats people as objects of charity, McCallin wrote. In contrast, a rights-based model recognises people as holders of rights who are encouraged and empowered to claim their rights.

Protecting these rights in crisis settings, often marked by economic collapse, social and political instability and the breakdown of social structures, is a delicate task. For any intervention to work, the focus must expand beyond children — to parents and other caregivers. When done right, it can heal historical harm and help families break the cycle of intergenerational trauma.

Rebuilding lives after a mass trauma event

Take Sia, 36, the mother of three. She wants to create a nurturing home for her children but struggles to contain her sudden outbursts of anger. These moments creep up on her “when my heart is broken,” she says.

Sia is carrying an invisible wound — the trauma of surviving a bloody 11-year civil war that ravaged her country, Sierra Leone. Her anger, she realises, is linked to the survival instincts she developed during the war, when even a hint of ‘weakness’ would put a target on one’s back.

A whole generation of parents like Sia have been given a voice by the Intergenerational Study of War-Affected Youth (ISWAY), led by Dr Theresa Betancourt of the Boston College School of Social Work. Since the war ended, ISWAY has followed 529 young people and their families and identified risk and protective factors that affect their health and wellbeing. In a country that lacks robust formal support from the government and NGOs, ISWAY has shown how people derive resilience from families, friends, and faith communities.

Learnings from the study have been used to develop evidence-based mental health care for at-risk youth; improve school engagement; increase employment opportunities; promote nutrition, health and hygiene; and reduce family violence in hard-to-reach families with young children. Given Sierra Leone’s workforce constraints, the ISWAY team has innovated via digital tools, community health workers, and early childhood teachers to scale these interventions.

In an article in Early Childhood Matters’ 2025 issue, Dr Betancourt and her colleagues tell the story of Sia, Maliki, Araphan, Aminita* and other young parents who are learning to rebuild their lives and create a better future for their children. If you are looking for hope in these restless times, this is the story I urge you to read

*Names have been changed.

Helping parents in crisis zones be the best they can be

How can parents imagine a better future while coping with the daily stressors of life in a conflict zone? That’s the question War Child, an organisation working to improve the lives of children and caregivers in war and conflict zones, is answering through Be There, a programme dedicated to the psychosocial wellbeing of caregivers in such environments.

Be There gives parents and other caregivers a safe space to learn simple, evidence-based stress management tools and techniques under the supervision of trained facilitators. Over nine sessions, they are taken through practical exercises that, for instance, help them better manage their anger or frustration and prevent it from negatively impacting their own wellbeing as well as their relationship with their children.

Stories from parents demonstrate the programme’s success. Says the War Child team in a 2023 interview: “Many men who participate in our sessions say that they used to be angry at home all the time. Now they tell us that whenever they feel they’re about to be angry, they can use a counting technique or a breathing technique to calm themselves. We know of caregivers who have turned the exercises from the programme into evening or weekend family activities. They sit together and practise relaxation techniques as a family, which is such a beautiful way to reduce interpersonal tension and create bonding.”

Discovering future generations are already here

Researchers in disparate parts of the world have also studied how intergenerational suffering affects lives decades after a crisis. For early development and health expert Tessa Roseboom, that crisis was a devastating food shortage in the Netherlands during the Second World War, known as the Dutch Hunger Winter.

“The egg that made me was formed when my mother was in my grandmother’s womb at the beginning of the Dutch Hunger Winter,” Roseboom says.

Her work has uncovered how, 80 years later, “we can still see the effects of famine on the children born that winter, but also on those children’s children — on my generation — in terms of their physical and mental health, their ability to learn and build meaningful relationships, their sensitivity to stress and risk of addiction, even on their levels of employment.”

She says these stories resonate strongly with people because they feel deeply personal and help galvanise action to prevent future catastrophes. “My ancestors tried to create opportunities for their offspring and their descendants, and I’ve been able to study this, so I feel a responsibility to share; to help people understand that the disaster taking place today” — such as the wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine — “will have an impact for decades.”

Roseboom adds, however, that we have the agency to change the course of history. “We can prevent the damage from growing even bigger,” she says, “by acting as soon as we can to stop the war[s] and providing food and local care.”

Safeguarding the future from the climate crisis

For the Maasai communities in northern Kenya, acting fast is crucial to protecting an entire way of life at the heart of their family structure. New Maasai mothers traditionally took several months off from household chores and tending livestock to care for the newborn and focus on their own recovery. But as drought and scarcity of resources become pervasive, women have to increasingly undertake heavy household tasks until the last trimester of their pregnancy. Food insecurity puts them at high risk of nutritional deficiencies. The lack of clean water and increased prevalence of water-borne diseases are leading to diarrhoea and other health conditions in infants.

Indigenous women around the world are leading the resistance against climate change and environmental degradation, says Global Greengrants Fund, an organisation that invests in community-driven solutions to environmental harm and social injustice.

“[This is] in part because socially defined gender roles often position them as stewards of the physical, economic, and cultural wellbeing of their communities,” Naomi Lanoi Leleto and Eva Rehse from Global Greengrants Fund write in our 2021 issue. “And since they are seen as being responsible for fetching water and managing land-based natural resources, they are disproportionately impacted by degradation of the environment that damages those resources.”

The fund has supported the women of Naatum Women’s Group to build resilient households that can help to adapt to climate change, through improved management of natural resources and by finding alternative ways for women to support themselves. The group has started collective income-generating activities including beekeeping, savings and lending associations, kitchen gardens for nutrition, and bead making.

“Aligning the climate and childhood agendas, understanding their interconnections and strengthening the case for each has to be a priority,” say Leleto and Rehse. “When we can better understand the links between different phases of life and climate change, we can respond more holistically to the challenges faced by Indigenous women, their children and their communities.

Subscribe now

The Good Start Challenge for Parental Wellbeing

“We sleep in profile,

Her belly in the hollow of my back,

To keep you between our bodies.

We try to shelter you in parenthesis, little morsels of time,

And I can feel your commotion

Traveling the rope of vertebrae

That will soon lift you up.

This is how the future gathers

At my back.”

~ A Father is Born (2025), Andreś Neuman, translated by Robin Myers

The connection between parent and child is as delicate as it is intense. The child is nourished by the warmth of the parent’s body just as a seed is held gently by the earth, until it is ready to lift itself up towards light. This journey of parent and child is of a piece with the cycle of nature, offering an anchor through change and uncertainty. In this issue, which coincides with the beginning of spring, we bring you select pieces from the Early Childhood Matters library that speak to nature’s transformational effect on children and caregivers.

‘Nature prescription’ during pregnancy can rewire the brain

Research shows that just 17 minutes spent in nature every day significantly boosts health and wellbeing. But it doesn’t have to be pristine woods and vast mountains that remain inaccessible to many. In the journal’s latest edition, Ecological engineer talks about steady, nourishing contact with the green within our reach — a little neighbourhood park or a mini rooftop garden.

Galle nearly lost her own life and her son’s during childbirth. She found that the exhausting journey of parenting was much easier outdoors.

Particularly striking is Galle’s idea of a ‘nature prescription’ during pregnancy, when the brain is highly neuroplastic. “If we use [this] window to plant tiny, repeatable nature habits (read: a morning walk to the pocket forest, a pause to notice birdsong, a nightly goodnight to the moon), those patterns are more likely to hold through the fog of postpartum and beyond. They become the rhythm in which our children grow up.” Read the piece in the 2026 issue here. Also check out Galle’s Internet of Nature podcast, supported by Van Leer Foundation, here.

How to heal ‘nature-deficit disorder’

Journalist and author sparked an international movement with his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. In this interview from 2021, Louv explains that while it’s not a medical diagnosis, nature-deficit disorder is a powerful metaphor conveying the human costs of alienation from nature.

Exposure to nature not only aids physical and psychological health, it also improves children’s cognitive skills, Louv says. Spending time in nature is especially helpful for kids stressed by circumstances beyond their control.

Despite all the evidence of its benefits, the natural world remains out of bounds for many children. Poor urban design, dumped toxins, and habitat destruction have made cities unsafe and unsuitable for outdoor play. Parents increasingly place children under ‘protective house arrest’, leading to addiction to digital devices. The antidote, says Louv, is to make getting outside in a natural area an intentional act.

Also watch The Beginning of Life 2: Outside, a documentary on how reconnecting with nature may be part of the cure for some of today’s greatest challenges, co-written by Early Childhood Matters contributor Lais Fleury.

Subscribe now

Reclaiming green spaces from urban sprawl

In 2019, Peru was celebrating 200 years of the country’s proclamation of independence. The city administration of the capital Lima decided to tackle a serious environmental challenge head on: Lima had only 3.5 sq m of green space per resident, less than half of the WHO recommended 9 sq m. At the same time, air pollution in Lima was nearly three times the WHO recommended level.

The city’s response — Limeños al Bicentenario — was a programme to transform public areas with low-cost interventions such as planting trees, and creating places for adults to sit and young children to play. It also aimed to build social cohesion by engaging residents to maintain these newly renovated areas while simultaneously improving the city’s resilience to climate change.

In the first two years of the programme, the city had developed 11 sites covering over 19,000 sq m and inspired over 500 people to volunteer. A hallmark of the programme was the careful choice of plant species fit for the local climate, with a goal to plant 4 million trees by 2030. The administration held workshops for local people on caring for urban greenery and exploring nature through art.

Read the article from 2021 here.

The same year, we published this story by Ian Mostert, an expert on connecting children with nature, on Rotterdam’s Green Schoolyard programme. Most schoolyards in the city were traditionally made of paving blocks and asphalt when Moster’s team started turning them into green spaces with support from the Municipality of Rotterdam. The benefits: a new inspiring learning environment; a challenging play space; a meeting area for residents; and a green space to improve resilience to extreme weather.

What earthworms can teach your child

Xoli Fuyani went to school during the apartheid in South Africa — one of a handful of black children in a multiracial school. Nature became a sanctuary for her from a profound culture shock, “a place of solitude, where I could be myself without judgment”. Now, working with the NGO Earth Child Project, Fuyani brings nature — and waste management — to marginalised schools through an environment education programme for children between 5 and 9. The programme’s hero: the humble earthworm.

The model is deceptively simple. It features two plastic crates stacked on top of each other, with the top crate housing about 1,000 earthworms. Children bring organic waste from home to feed the earthworms. They regularly water the crate and watch as the worms turn the waste into compost. The moist compost drains into the bottom crate, creating ‘worm tea’, which is used to grow a vegetable garden. At the end of the year, the vegetables are used to make a big salad, and the waste is again fed to the earthworms, completing a full cycle.

Read our interview with Fuyani in the 2021 issue here.

Share

Question for you: How do you integrate nature in your everyday life? Write to us (mention your city), and we will feature your response in a future edition.

Are you a parent worried about bringing up your child in the complex, confusing world of artificial intelligence? Jo Aggarwal, founder and CEO of the AI-driven wellbeing platform Wysa, has some practical wisdom for you: treat AI tools like you treat Google Maps.

AI can be a great partner to a new parent by offering tips on everyday parenting challenges (“My wife’s away and the baby is not taking milk from the bottle, what do I do?”). But the control must firmly remain with the parent.

Think of how we use Google Maps. It is generally extremely useful for guiding us on a journey, Aggarwal says in the latest issue of Early Childhood Matters dedicated to the theme ‘parenting in a changing world’. But we must also lean into our own knowledge about which roads are better or worse.

AI can be a powerful parenting aid as long as it is not used for ‘cognitive outsourcing’ — taking away a child’s (and parent’s) innate ability to problem-solve, adds technologist Daanish Masood Alavi. It works best when used to fuel the fundamental quality that makes us human: our imagination.

Alavi, a single dad, is training an AI model to create an epic story where his son is a space adventurer exploring different knowledge traditions, from Tao Te Ching’s teachings to Rumi’s poems. He says parents’ use of AI must factor in two big provisos: First, educate yourself on the basics of AI, including its tendency to generate misinformation. And second, understand that talking to AI can never beat human connection.

Building an infrastructure of care

For Charlotte Michailidis, enabling these human connections is her life’s mission. Michailidis nearly lost her son to a medical emergency when he was five days old. She found that many new parents were ‘flying blind’, unable to access support and community for even ‘normal’ parenting tasks. To solve for this Michailidis built Parenthood Ventures, an ecosystem for early-stage ParentTech (startups serving parents), from reproductive health through to navigating the teen years.

Through her company, Michailidis helps parent innovators find each other and be inspired by the success of others. Parenthood Ventures has backed mothers like Andrea Ippolito who struggle with breastfeeding. With a background in telehealth, Ippolito founded SimpliFed, which provides virtual support for breastfeeding and baby feeding. Then there’s Elizabeth Adams, whose daughter struggled with reading. None of the existing reading apps felt purpose-built for children like hers. So Adams, who has a background in clinical psychology, co-founded Ello, which uses voice-recognition technology to help early readers gain confidence, at a fraction of the cost of traditional tutoring.

“With greater recognition and support,” says Michailidis, “the future has the potential to be bright for parent innovators, and for a new generation of innovations to improve parental wellbeing, created by those who understand it best.”

The vision of building an infrastructure of care also drives , founder and CEO of Caring Africa. The organisation works to create sustainable childcare systems, unlocking the potential of the care economy, and ‘making care visible, valuable, and viable – for families, employers and economies alike’. Adesiyan, who was one of the speakers at the Early Childhood Matters 2026 launch event, adds a critical sobering note on the current AI hype: who designs AI and benefits from it?

We need to be honest about what AI is solving for, says Adesiyan. Is it serving only profit-seeking corporations or the end users of technology?

Share

Un-gendering care

While the technology industry is deeply gendered, so is the world of caregiving, which is often branded as an exclusively women’s domain. This is changing — thanks to the new science of fatherhood. Research shows that new dads experience profound biological changes of their own. Their testosterone levels drop dramatically, and fathers with higher oxytocin levels feel more strongly bonded to their child compared to fathers with lower oxytocin.

Lee Gettler, Director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, has studied these changes accompanying fatherhood. He was often asked if they made a man less ‘manly’. “Whenever I talk about my research now,” he says, “I invite people to consider the question of how men conceptualise their own manhood. Most men who are fathers and partners value those roles for themselves. They see themselves as more manly, not less, if they’re invested in supporting their family, becoming role models and doing their best for their kids.”

One of my most favourite stories of change from this issue comes from a world far removed from conventional conversations on parenting: football.

When the Moroccan men’s football team beat Portugal in the quarter-final of the 2022 World Cup, they celebrated on the pitch by dancing with their mothers. That image stirred Morad Fareed, an entrepreneur and former professional footballer, to wonder: what can be achieved if the nonpareil global popularity of football — a sport with six billion fans worldwide — were used to support mothers?

Fareed founded FC Mother, which works with football clubs to run maternal health programmes. “Football is a truly global language and the world’s largest family,” Fareed says. “It transcends religion, government, jobs, it transcends everything. I thought, if we can mobilise that family to support mothers, we can change the health of humanity – one pregnancy at a time.”

The future of parenting may be uncertain, but being in community can make the journey feel less lonely and more secure.

Few trophies are bigger than that.

Subscribe now

Question for you

How are you preparing for parenthood in a rapidly changing world? Share you story in the comments, and we will feature your responses in a future edition of this newsletter.

Leave a comment

The 2026 issue of Early Childhood Matters will be published on 12 February (sign up here to get a free copy on launch day). The issue will round up a three-year storytelling journey dedicated to a central theme: the importance of parent and caregiver wellbeing.

When we chose this topic in 2023, we sought to unapologetically foreground the often neglected needs of parents and caregivers. We framed the credo “people over parents”. Over these three years, we have told almost 100 stories featuring 119 experts from 27 countries, covering fields as diverse as anthropology, urban design, government, technology, and social entrepreneurship.

I caught up with the 2026 guest editor to get a peek into this issue’s powerful editorial lineup. Edited excerpts:

Tanmoy (T): What can readers expect from this issue?

Ignacio (I): We have experimented with different formats, and storytelling styles with the goal of encouraging reflection — sometimes through provocation — while also offering practical insights. This issue explores how parenthood is evolving in an uncertain time with profound social and technological changes. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a part of our daily routines faster than we can decide how to use it responsibly, we need AI literacy for both children and parents. But whether you are taking a walk in nature with your child or giving commands to a robot or ChatGPT, at the end of the day the most valuable part of the parent-child relationship is presence. How do we protect this?

Register for ECM 2026 launch series

T: Is there a common thread running through the stories?

I: Yes, the idea that raising children is not an individual but a collective endeavour. As with the two previous issues, this year too we advocate for parenting as a shared responsibility, illustrated through a familiar experience: the chaos that follows a baby’s arrival, and the relief that comes when family and friends step in with care and support. We show this dynamic through Becky Barnicoat’s comic strip that offers a fresh perspective.

T: In past issues, there was an emphasis on recognising traditional and indigenous knowledge. We published articles on how New Zealand’s health care system needs to open up to Māori experiences; how Afro-Brazilian communities use music and dance as a part of intergenerational healing; or how coffee ceremonies in Ethiopia have helped reduce maternal mortality. Will that focus continue?

I: Yes, very much so. For example, we have a must-read piece on legal reforms in Mexico that protect the work of traditional midwives. The law is a big step in strengthening the autonomy and self-determination of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. This issue also addresses the creation of new traditions and the reshaping of social norms. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas explores how the loss of parental rituals has left many families without a sense of meaning, support, or belonging, and how everyday rituals in early parenthood can foster wellbeing. And the writer Gabriela Wiener reflects on raising her non-biological son within a polyamorous family. She examines an “illegitimate” yet deeply lived mother-son bond, sustained not by law but by love.

Become a reader of the ECM journal

T: In the 2023 issue, the Mayor of Addis Ababa had talked about her vision of making the city the best in Africa to raise a child and be a mother. What kind of political will to support early childhood development and parents can we look forward to?

I: We have an interview with the mayors of two cities in Zambia, Chilando Chitangala of Lusaka and Christopher Habeenzu of Chongwe, who represent two different political parties — and yet are united in their vision to “leave their country better than we found it”. We also interviewed Igor Normando, the Mayor of Belém in the Brazilian Amazon that recently hosted the COP30 climate negotiations. He reflects on linking climate action with early childhood development.

T: Last year, ’s piece on ‘dad brains‘ and the interview with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on ‘man the nurturer‘ challenged stereotypical views of fatherhood. As a fulltime father yourself, how did you approach this?

I: We continue to press for changing the narrative around fatherhood. It’s not that in the past fathers never took care of children. But they didn’t speak up. Writers in the 70s and the 80s would privilege ‘big’ topics like politics. They wouldn’t address ‘domestic’ issues like paternity. In Latin America, in Europe, there were almost no books where a father wrote about his children. It was the opposite — the stereotype of the ‘lost father’ was everywhere. Classics like Pedro Parámo by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo showed the child going on a journey to discover their absent father. Now, more fathers are involved in child care than ever, and they are starting to open up about their experience of fatherhood, something we discuss in an interview with author Andrés Neuman. I think our readers will also enjoy anthropologist Lee Gettler’s piece, which explains the biological changes that help men prepare for fatherhood, as well as Johan Bävman’s photo essay, which explores how parental leave shapes social identity and norms.

T: I did not know the term ‘alloparenting’ when I started work on the 2023 issue. Are their concepts like that you discovered for the first time?

T: Yeah, the ideas of allostasis and the social brain in the interview with neuroscientist Shir Atzil. Even though these aren’t new terms, I think many parents aren’t familiar with them. They do something radical: recast caregiving not as a moral performance tied to gender or biology, but as a relational practice rooted in presence and reliability. You will have to read the issue to discover more about them and what they mean for parents’ and children’s wellbeing (smiles).

T: Is there a broad message you’d like to share with readers?

I: The wellbeing of children and parents isn’t a topic reserved for those who have children. It doesn’t matter whether you are directly involved with bringing up a child, it would make a big difference if you were curious about the world of babies, toddlers and their caregivers.

Share

T: Finally, how did you find the process of helping curate this edition?

I: I am grateful that we got to tell some powerful stories with amazing support and inputs from the Van Leer team. My goal as guest editor was to pick authors and stories that’d provoke deeper and broader thinking on vital topics. For instance, I’m very glad we are publishing a piece imagining a world with fewer children, which is the journal’s first-ever fiction piece. I also found it personally nourishing that we were able to cover so many diverse perspectives, including a polyamorous mother, AI experts, neuroscientists, political leaders, and a former football player. It was a great process of learning. I’d have loved to read all these stories before I became a father, and you don’t need to be a parent to find them compelling.

At the micro‑park in Fortaleza, where toddlers weave between curved paths and natural play materials, a mother laughs with her little one. Around them, mayors, urban professionals and early childhood practitioners from 65 Brazilian cities gather for the 4th National Urban95 Convening. This is Brazil's Urban95 network in motion—the largest of its kind, and a testament to what happens when cities make babies, toddlers and their caregivers central to their agendas.

For three days this August, representatives from across Brazil connected in Fortaleza. It was a celebration of scale and spirit: 65 cities exchanging experiences, 19 mayors imagining new possibilities, and more than 150 participants learning together how to implement urban design that nurtures early childhood and parenthood.

The gathering opened in the historic Theatro José de Alencar, where Claudia Vidigal, Brazil Representative for the Van Leer Foundation, welcomed participants. On stage, Zelma Madeira, Secretary for Racial Equality of Ceará, reminded the room of an urgent truth: the fight against racism begins in early childhood. Paediatrician Daniel Becker deepened the reflection, highlighting the links between health, care, and city design in shaping children’s futures.

Brazil’s living stories of care

The power of Brazil’s Urban95 network lies not only in its scale but in its diversity of approaches. From the Early Childhood Matters (ECM) archive, dive deeper and explore the themes discussed at this month’s Urban95 Convening.

In São Paulo, Casa de Marias has shown how Black women are reclaiming care in mental health, offering mothers spaces of dignity, healing, and solidarity. Their work demonstrates that advancing early childhood means confronting racial inequities.

In Maranhão, Usina da Imaginação has drawn on Indigenous and Afro‑Brazilian traditions like Tambor de Crioula, showing how rhythm, spirituality, and community practices can decolonise public policy and offer caregivers vital networks of support.

In Jundiaí, former Mayor Luiz Fernando Machado’s leadership has embedded early childhood into the fabric of the city, through integrated teams dedicated to the early years, and spaces and services designed so that every child feels seen and cared for.

Together, these stories reflect the breadth of Brazil’s innovation: led by community, grounded in culture, and integrated into decision-making.

Fortaleza as a city-wide classroom

At the Urban95 Convening in Fortaleza, these ideas took physical form. Participants visited Cidade das Crianças and two micro‑parks, where child‑centred urban design creates safe, playful, and welcoming spaces for families.

These visits transformed theory into experience, illustrating how design can invite connection, joy, and belonging.

The convening closed with reflections from the city of Fortaleza and a talk by Kaka Werá, a Tapuia writer and Indigenous leader, who invited participants to see ancestry and spirituality as guides for intercultural dialogue and the philosophy of bem viver, the well living.

As the Urban95 network grows—with Belém joining and preparing to host CoP30—Brazil is showing the world how early childhood and climate‑adaptive strategies can converge to build cities that are sustainable and inclusive.

Subscribe now

Our moderator for the conversation, , sets the scene: “As a feminist writer who covered motherhood, I had not realised how deeply ingrained the ‘WEIRD’ (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) perspective of parenthood was; this assumption that I was going to do it all alone. WEIRD parenting had become the default and norm for me, and for so many others around the world. And I think we're all here together today because we know this just isn't working anymore”.

Share your thoughts on the topic with us:

What can you share on the conversation around care as an individual versus collective responsibility?

Alison: “The way that we live has really changed the way that we think about caregiving. And that's happened more over the last 15 or 20 years than before. So you already see these changes with industrialisation, but for reasons that are not completely clear that's happened even more in the recent past. So you have this situation where children are not exploring, they don't have the freedom to be independent, because they don't have that network of caregivers (or ‘alloparents’ we evolved to depend on), and that affects the way that they learn about caregiving themselves”.

Alicia: “I had a child when I was a new immigrant in the United States, coming from Paraguay and Israel, and being used to this extended family and community and everyone coming together. I was shocked and depressed by this expectation that I was supposed to bond with my baby. I think in some ways, unexpected consequences, attachment theory and all the emphasis on maternal sensitivity or maternal responsiveness has fostered this idea that it is all in the mother-child relationship. And I still remember when scientists started saying,

‘Where are the fathers? Where are the grandparents?’

It was like,

‘Yes! Where are they?’”

What have you learnt as a psychotherapist on how to support parents more holistically through a two-generation lens, broadly speaking and in the context of trauma?

Alicia: “What I wanted to do in my work is include the fathers, include the aunts, include the grandparents, and have an intergenerational connection together with the two-generation approach. We are now more and more involved in a three-generation approach because what we find is that, very often with this emphasis on new and improved philosophy in the West, where anything that's new is considered better, we are disconnected from the wisdom of our ancestors. And grandparents are afraid of telling their children what they think their grandchildren need, and parents are often dismissive of what the grandparents are saying, and then there is this fear.

The motto of my treatment is speaking the unspeakable. Really giving people permission to say things that they are afraid of saying, for fear of offending, for fear of getting hurt, etc. What we find is that when parents come to us saying:

‘My child is aggressive’ or ‘my child has been expelled from childcare’,

we start by acknowledging what it feels like as a parent:

‘What has it been like to have a child? How has your life changed? What has happened to you?’

And we see body language change, so that they move from this feeling of:

‘What have I done wrong?’ to ‘How is my experience affected?’

Parents are so quickly criticised when their children are not doing well and there is that feeling of self-blame, of shame — particularly for parents who are low income, immigrants, minorities — who already feel that society is looking at them negatively.

And then this idea of giving them a safe space where we say:

‘Your experience matters to me. I don't care about you only as a parent, I care about you as a human being.’

And that changes the entire climate of the family. Then we start asking:

‘What helps you and who helps you? How can we strengthen those sources of support so that you feel that you are met emotionally in more ways than what I can offer?’

So we, as therapists, become part of an ecosystem that we help build. And I cannot emphasise enough the role of community.

Which aspects of society are responsible for making parents feel isolated and how can we mitigate that?

Alison: “The physical environment is obviously a big one. Age segregation, where older people are there, babies are here, and parents are either at home or in their office. And the fact that parenting or taking care of people doesn't fit the typical economic models is a big issue. On the one hand, we feel like this close intimate thing is not the sort of thing that you can buy and sell. But on the other hand, what that means is that we don't have any economic support. So, in a world where everything is about things that you can buy and sell, to have this thing that's so important and so central, that isn't something that you can buy or sell, is really difficult and challenging.

An idea that I've had, for example, is suppose you had a grandmother in each preschool classroom. You need to have trained early childhood teachers but suppose you also have someone who's an older person in the community, who just wants to hang out with a bunch of three year olds. This means that you have an extra person who, as Alicia beautifully said, has that wisdom and can function like a grandmother. You could then use that to support that older person too (i.e. pay them twice what they would get with social security).

A little anecdote literally from yesterday: my grandchildren were visiting and my 90-year-old parents are in an assisted living facility in Berkeley, so my son took my two-year-old grandson to visit them and there was just such incredible joy. He was running around, talking to everybody, and you could just feel the way that everyone in that room was suddenly alive and happy and engaged. Having that child there was really transformative.”

Stories from our speakers

~ Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, and guest editor of Early Childhood Matters 2025

• https://earlychildhoodmatters.online/2025/when-she-carried-my-baby-she-carried-me-too/

• https://earlychildhoodmatters.online/2025/finding-sanity-in-ancient-ritual/

~ Alison Gopnik, Professor & Principal of the Social Science of Caregiving research project at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University

• https://earlychildhoodmatters.online/2025/were-all-trying-to-think-about-how-care-works/

~ Alicia Lieberman, Professor & Director of the Child Trauma Research Programme at the University of California, San Francisco

• https://earlychildhoodmatters.online/2025/protecting-children-begins-with-healing-parents/

~ Karima Grant, Representative for Regional Africa portfolio at the Van Leer Foundation

• https://vanleerfoundation.org/stories/an-interview-with-karima-grant-regional-representative-africa/

In Early Childhood Matters’ nearly three-decade history, the journal has regularly turned to the visceral power of awe, joy and wonder. These are fundamental human experiences that don’t just shape early childhood development. Research increasingly shows that they also have a profound wholesome impact on the wellbeing of parents and caregivers.

They are not “nice-to-have” extras or simplistic ideas, especially in a world with deep intersecting crises affecting the most vulnerable among us. How to create sustainable pockets of awe and joy for those who most need them — and cannot always access them owing to systemic and structural barriers — is as exciting and complex a challenge as any in this sector.

When science, urban planning, art and innovation come together in the service of joy, we get mini-revolutions, futures filled with hope, and stories of change that endure generations. In today’s edition, we curate four such stories.

1. ‘Magic happens when children and caregivers create memories’ by Ana Paula Marques and Danielle M.G. Areal

What if you gave vulnerable cityscapes a radical makeover — into living sites of joyful memories, song, and play — with only a brush and paint? That’s what the Allma Hub’s Pé de Infância project has done in Brazil’s Jundiaí, Niterói, Crato, Pelotas, Fortaleza, Caruaru, Brasiléia and Campinas neighbourhoods.

Ana Paila Marques, Founder of Allma Hub, and Danielle M.G. Areal, Director of Planning and Research, shared that most children in these areas are cared for by their mothers or grandmothers, who are under stress to meet their family’s basic needs. They often turn to screens to keep their children occupied. The solution? Turning the city’s streets and pavements into “playgrounds” that activate the caregivers’ happy memories and create daily rituals of fun and connection with their children.

The Pé de Infância team painted traditional tongue twisters, stories, games and suggestions for spontaneous play on the surface of urban spaces that were part of the caregivers’ daily schedules — alleys, walls, bus stops, stairways.

The innovation has helped parents like Ingrid, 24, access a whole new face of her city. “I follow my regular route, but now my path has games that we are familiar with, and they remind me to interact with my son, spending time in a fun and positive way for him.”

Read the story here.

2. ‘The power of awe in early parenthood’ by Dacher Keltner

“It ripped me open.” That has to be the most visceral expression of what a sense of awe can do to a human being that I’ve ever read.

Dacher Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the host of the GGSC’s award-winning podcast The Science of Happiness and a co-instructor of a popular online course of the same name.

“I was lucky to be raised by parents who prioritised awe,” Keltner writes in the 2025 edition of Early Childhood Matters. “We did wild camping trips and museums and listened to music together. And I remember distinctly when my first daughter was born – Natalie, 27 years ago – and the experience was just full of awe. It ripped me open and all of life was different.”

Keltner’s two-decade research shows the miracle of opening ourselves to moments of awe, from activating the vagus nerve, which helps us relax and feel at ease, to inducing wonder, curiosity, joy, and humility by shifting our focus outwards and towards shared rather than solitary experiences.

In one of GGSC’s podcast episodes, two parents raising toddlers try some simple lab-tested, awe-inducing practices, like watching movies on migratory birds and volcanoes with their children. “We hope to help them intentionally experience awe in a variety of forms, and to also share those experiences with their kids.”

I won’t give you spoilers, but the results are magical.

Read Keltner’s introduction here and listen to the podcast here (be prepared for lots of “woow!s” and “amaazing!s”).

3. ‘Singing lullabies soothes stress in parents’ by Sarah Johnson

Who knew the humble lullaby could carry in it the seeds of such profound change?

Carnegie Hall's Lullaby Project pairs new and expecting parents with professional artists to create personalised lullabies for their babies. But the benefits far exceed the calming effect on the babies themselves. Research shows that the project significantly improves parental wellbeing across five key areas: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement.

Carnegie Hall’s Chief Education Officer, Sarah Johnson, shares how parents who participate in the project report increased trust in their own parenting abilities. The lullabies serve as vehicles of identity and lineage, an expression of love and joy that can accompany parents through places where these qualities are scarce, providing comfort and a sense of home. They become family heirlooms passed down through generations. They can also help strengthen other important relationships: sharing their songs with family and friends can serve as a way to connect new parents with loved ones near and far.

Here’s my favourite bit from the story: In the Welsh town of Neath, a health visitor working with Carnegie Hall’s UK partner team observed that the project is “particularly beneficial in cases where we see that a family is at risk of becoming isolated … We see real positive changes in confidence for parents and children taking part in these music sessions.”

Read this beautiful story and be soothed by some of the lullabies here.

4. “My mother’s early years triggered her love for the environment” by Wanjira Mathai in conversation with K.A. Dilday

What is your earliest memory? For Wanjira Mathai, daughter of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, it involves planting a shrub that changed colours, from white to purple. “As a child I thought it was fascinating, and I remember thinking: ‘We planted that.’”

Mathai originally set out for a career in medicine, studying biology and public health. Then, she decided to return to Kenya — “Everybody thought I was crazy to be packing up my life to return home with no job, no nothing” — and ended up helping her mother’s Green Belt Movement.

She stayed on permanently after discovering the powerful impact of the work among Kenyan women. “The Green Belt Movement was based around restoring land, securing food, securing water and ensuring fuel security,” Mathai says. “So, getting women to plant trees was a symbol of reclaiming your ability to manage what you have – your natural environment – and there was also a component of food and food security at a family level.”

The movement empowered women financially. And when women have financial security, they invest most of it back into their children, their families and the community. “And so when they win, a lot of people win.”

Mathai believes that the way to get young people to steward the environment is by igniting in them the kind of love of nature her mother had as a child. “She loved playing in the river with the tadpoles, under the leaves of the arrowroots. She would spend hours and hours there…. You know the statement: ‘You will protect what you love’? That’s the way to get children in.”

Read Mathai’s complete interview here.

Care makes strange animals of us. The philosophy of care flies in the face of everything we know about ‘selfish’ human nature: When you care for children, you actively want them to get stronger (than even you). You don’t hoard power and resources - you give them away freely, even if it means having less for yourself. A caregiver isn’t trying to negotiate and extract the best ‘deal’ for themselves, unlike in most social relationships. In fact, as our 2025 edition’s guest editor writes in her editorial centred on motherhood, caregiving often makes you forget to ask fundamental questions: “Why I didn’t expect more care as a caregiver, what care I needed, and how I would get it.” You can read more of her ideas on Made with Care.

In the bestseller The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship between Parents and Children, psychologist Alison Gopnik offers a scathing critique of the evolution of parenting in the past three decades, when “the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, goal-oriented labour intended to create a particular kind of child and thereby a particular kind of adult.” Gopnik argues that this is not just based on bad science, it's also bad for kids and parents.

Speaking with the Van Leer Foundation’s CEO Michael Feigelson in the latest edition of Early Childhood Matters, Gopnik adds that the mainstream conversation, dominated by market economics, has traditionally neglected the subject of care.

Care is a sacred totem of our civilization that “we cannot buy or sell.”

As she and her team at The Social Science of Caregiving project at Stanford University ask: “A particularly urgent question now is how to guarantee that caregivers and those they care for get the resources they need to thrive.”

A great starting point is by abandoning distorted ideas about care — none more damaging than the myth that caring for babies is the sole responsibility of parents.

Subscribe now

The perils of isolated parenting

We have plenty of evidence that perhaps the most profound legacy of human evolution is alloparenting — caring as a community undertaking, where entire tribes and villages came together to raise children. And yet, we find it notoriously hard to look past the ‘two-person-team model’ of modern parenting. In fact, too often caring is reduced to a solo gig — the mother’s.

Evolutionary anthropologist Nikhil Chaudhary and child and adolescent psychiatrist Annie Swanepoel explain the perils of parenting in isolation, ignoring the wisdom that humans needed to survive as hunter-gatherers, for more than 95% of our species’ history:

The loneliness of modern parents left to their own devices also often hides stories of deep fear, shame, and trauma from their own childhood. It’s a ghost that can come back to haunt their children, says Alicia Lieberman, infant mental health expert who co-developed the Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) framework.

Based on attachment theory, CPP helps parents reclaim their capacity to love, transforming the fear and anger from traumatic experiences into a passionate commitment to protect and nurture their children and themselves.

Listen to a soundbite from Dr. Lieberman on learning from 40 years of studying trauma:

The burden of this intergenerational trauma is felt particularly severely by people from vulnerable communities — immigrants, those with high exposure to violence, and those at the economic margins, deprived of community scaffolding.

Share

What happens when we connect care to the community?

The current issue of Early Childhood Matters shares the story of Anita, her partner Raul, and their 3-month-old baby Andrés (not their real names). Anita and Andrés were referred to a CPP clinician by a pædiatric social worker in San Francisco who was concerned about the baby’s lack of weight gain and Anita’s inconsistent attendance at pædiatric appointments. Modern parenting would denounce Anita and Raul as failed parents. But over the course of her work with the family, the clinician discovered the real reason for the family’s stress: an unplanned pregnancy, extreme economic precarity, lack of childcare, and the looming threat of deportation back to their countries where they had endured horrific violence.

Over a year of treatment, the clinician helped Anita and Raul address their guilt and shame and find kinship in their shared trauma. Crucially, she also connected them with community food banks, attended court hearings with Anita, and enlisted a pro bono immigration attorney to help with immigration proceedings.

“The weight of little Andrés normalised and he was showing a healthy developmental trajectory by the time he was 6 months old,” writes Lieberman.

Another of my favourite stories of community-led care from the pages of Early Childhood Matters features Dinah from Kangemi, an informal settlement in Nairobi. Dinah, in her early-30s, used to wake up every morning with a difficult decision to make: where should she leave her twin baby daughters when she goes to work for the day as a cleaner? Her choices for childcare were slim: she could leave the babies at home with her 7-year-old daughter, who would need to stay off school for the day, or pay to leave them in an informal daycare centre with terrible facilities.

That’s when Dinah discovered Lydia, a trained ‘mamapreneur’ running a new daycare as part of the social enterprise Kidogo. For about USD 1 a day, Lydia’s daycare — born out of her own frustrations as a mother — transformed Dinah and her babies’ lives.

“Lydia really takes good care of my children,” Dinah says in a story Kidogo founder Sabrina Habib wrote for this journal. “I fully trust her. I don’t have stress at all because I know my babies are in good hands. I would previously constantly worry about them, now I can call just once a day to check in because I know they are OK. My babies have improved, they are healthy, they can use the potty now, feed themselves and can walk all on their own. I couldn’t ask for more.”

When parents, other caregivers, and empowered social stakeholders join forces, they can heal the system. Not only does such a joined-up community bring more love and care to the child, it can also address the fundamental questions Elissa Strauss highlights: how to help parents to expect more care and demand the care they need — and serve up a road map of how they can get it.

How do you think we can strengthen collective care in the early years?

The Van Leer Foundation will be holding an online conversation circle that will unpack why we expect parents to do it all alone and how we can strengthen care communities around parents and other caregivers in the early years.

More details and a registration link will be shared on this Substack soon!

I was moved by this accidental discovery. It made me aware that as this journal’s former guest editor, and now as consulting editor of this newsletter, I am connected to a long tradition of free, deeply researched, and lovingly curated knowledge on early childhood development — knowledge that has shaped urgent debate and dialogue and catalysed change across the world for almost three decades.

Over this period, hundreds of experts from sociology and social work; anthropology; neuroscience; medicine; business and economics; architecture and design; policy and civic administration; art and culture; and, most important, families with young children, have generously shared their wisdom with thousands of readers. From leading-edge academic research to groundbreaking policies and programmes to lived experience accounts, Early Childhood Matters remains a repository of timeless insights that you will not find anywhere else. As a platform that began life before the turn of the millennium, it also stands as a one-of-a-kind document promising continuity amid disruption and chaos.

To me, Early Childhood Matters’ greatest value lies in the big questions it asks that are frequently ahead of the prevalent discourse. For instance, the journal put on its cover the declaration ‘Fathers Matter Too’ way back in 2001, when the topic of the role of dads in caregiving was nowhere near as commonplace as it is today.

Through the late 90s and 2000s, the journal was repeatedly advocating for children’s right to be heard and to participate in designing interventions meant for them — a battle that’s as pressing today.

The journal has also regularly championed the safety of children in violent and emergency situations, batted for promoting social inclusion and respecting diversity in the early years, dismantled the myth that caregiving is only the parents’ job by digging deep into the science and evolutionary history of alloparenting, and helped resist the erasure of the concerns of marginalised and vulnerable families, such as those of seasonal migrant workers.

Readers have also loved the space Early Childhood Matters has held for the role of culture and heritage, music and folklore, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence and other forms of transformative technology in advancing our understanding of the formative years. Taken together, it is a wealth of resources that should have its own dedicated university curriculum.

For some time now, the Van Leer Foundation has wanted to expand the journal and shape a platform where this incredible history and body of knowledge could get a second life. Early Childhood Matters exists to bring voices and ideas from the global early childhood community together. The Foundation is open to new formats and dynamic avenues that allows us to engage with and grow this community. We are also keen to introduce the journal’s content library to people beyond the early childhood development universe, meeting them where they are, such as on channels like this.

The True North of this newsletter will be the epistemic humility that Jim Smale had invoked in his 1999 editorial. We will continue to shun the “paternalistic attitude on the part of adults who feel that they know about children and childhoods because they have themselves gone through childhood.” And we will keep privileging the spirit of wonder and curiosity that is the beating heart of early childhood development.

As Jim wrote, an adult experimenter who puts a puzzle in front of a child would define success as completion of the puzzle. But for a two-year old, success could be making a circle or a train out of the puzzle pieces. This newsletter will be dedicated to such delightful surprises and new perspectives.

Thank you for joining us on this journey.

With excitement and gratitude,

Tanmoy

PS: Do share this newsletter with your friends and write back to us with your thoughts. We will be reading every single message.

A note on this newsletter from the Van Leer Foundation

For over 25 years, through Early Childhood Matters, the Van Leer Foundation has shared global impact stories from leaders working to ensure a good start in life for babies, toddlers and their families worldwide. Our goal remains the same: to inspire professionals across sectors with ideas to take action and create positive change for the early years. We will now be sharing some of the most insightful articles from the journal here on Substack to reach a new universe of engaged and thoughtful readers. We will offer you a curation of our best stories that add critical and often overlooked nuances to current conversations, enrich discussion, broaden perspectives and encourage connection around early childhood topics.

From pathbreaking programmes and policies to game-changing scientific research and technological innovation, we will present to you stories of profound urgency, hope, and inspiration told by the wisest minds in the field.

Subscribe now to get it all straight into your inbox.

Subscribe now