Abstract
This article examines the policy environment as a context for infant development by drawing on the perspectives of Urie Bronfenbrenner, Arnold Sameroff, Desmond Runyan, Robert Hill, Alfred Kamerman, Sheila Kahn, and Eugene Steuerle and his colleagues. The author suggests that in the United States of America today, one of the greatest risks to the healthy development of young children may be the risk of the loss or disruption of important caregiving relationships. The concepts of social forces, social policies, and policy change are used as a framework to consider how the development of individual infants, within their caregiving relationships, may be shaped by the policy environment.
In the United States of America today, the greatest threat to healthy development that very young children experience may arise from failures in their relationships with adult caregivers. The National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has framed the issue clearly:
Children grow and thrive in the context of close and dependable relationships that provide love and nurturance, security, responsive interaction, and encouragement for exploration. Without at least one such relationship, development is disrupted and the consequences can be severe and long-lasting.1
But stable, consistently nurturing relationships with their parents are not available to many babies. Large numbers of very young children experience disruption and losssometimes repeatedlyin their relationships with important caregivers during the earliest years of life. During the past half-century transformations in many domains of economic and family life have profoundly altered both the quality and quantity of children's experiences with adults in their earliest years. We can still only guess what effects these changes are having on the development of particular groups of children or upon whole generations of citizens.
Can social policythe allocation of public resourcesreduce the risk or mitigate the harm that occurs when nurturing relationships between infants and parents fail to form, are disrupted, or disappear? Given our history and current policy environment, is this country even likely to attempt to use social policy to safeguard, strengthen, or repair relationships at risk? These are the questions that this article will explore.