Healthy Systems Are Built on Collaboration, Cooperation and Coordination

Figure 1: Bronfenbrenner: ecological theory of child development

(Source: Santrock, 2008, retrieved from website)

 

If we think about a child coming into this world (we would argue no matter where), their developmental trajectory will highly depend on the grounding image about the child that adults have in both explicit and implicit narratives. Starting from family moving to the broader society, across generations, these narratives are shaped by intertwined interactions between all levels of the system as Bronfenbrenner describes them. Seeing children or not seeing them as competent, with agency, owners of rights, ready to learn and assert their unique diversity and potential – still to be discovered and understood by others – engines of society’s development, etc. shapes in a particular way the nature of the interactions between them and families, services, neighbourhoods, communities, society at large. It also determines the extent to which these environments (i.e. adults) value (or not) and create (or not enough) opportunities for children to be and become aligned with their uniqueness in their ongoing development. The dominant narrative around the image of the child in a society can be distilled into what we would call the mindset(s). It is not homogenously distributed across all levels of the ecological system, across all generations, and all sectors, but it can be recognized especially when various systems in the society (e.g. welfare systems, health systems, education systems, etc.) go through reforming changes.

And such narratives accompany the child at least until they officially become adults (i.e. parents themselves, having a job, self-sufficiency, and full autonomy over their life) and influence their life.

 

4.  Changing mindsets and the systemic changes

 

Changing mindsets about a child’s development, their agency and role in their own being and becoming, means influencing the narratives in various contexts, from the micro- to macro-system level (see Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model).

 

Changing such narratives to reach a common place from where generative systemic changes can occur requires time, a co-constructed theory of change and strong and pertinent evidences. Multiple actors need to be involved (from children and family to community level, from professionals to policymakers, across sectors, from local to national level, and cross-country), multiple types of actions have to be enacted (from community mobilization to community debates, from testing new approaches to collecting evidences, from campaigns to roundtables), and multiple channels for communication and true dialogue (formal, non-formal, informal) need to be created and enabled (including the new technology). The final destination is where the new narrative is no longer questioned: it becomes the foundational rationale for which changes are enacted.

 

Working at the micro-system level (family, school, workplace, etc.) means engaging with children and families (across age groups) in a meaningful way, providing platforms for open dialogue and intergenerational learning and negotiations around the rationales for change, what needs to be changed and how change will happen. A new narrative can emerge only if the voices of each other are heard through co-constructive approaches, facilitated and enabled towards creating relevant changes in the environments where they live.

The bottom-up approach (moving from micro-systems to meso- and exo-systems) is highly efficient in terms of building a new mindset, but its power relies not only in co-participation, but also in:

• discussing and aligning forward-looking values across various actors, ages, sectors and levels of governance

• building shared understandings across actors of different ages and sectors, while valuing the diversity of views

• incorporating answers to the real and emerging needs and concerns of children, families and communities

• modelling new ways of ‘doing things’ while building on the diversity of strengths the actors and services bring together

• reflecting on setbacks and adjusting processes to the dynamics of the local contexts

• celebrating documented achievements and building further on them

• creating the co-ownership of the changes made step by step.

 

In systems that serve and affect the children’s and families’ lives, changing mindsets in a bottom-up approach that is driven by a child- and family-responsive paradigm may lead to systemic changes, but top-down systemic changes that are not based on a true dialogue with children and families do not lead to changing mindsets, thus to unsuccessful and/or not lasting changes.

 

5.  Learning from the early childhood field

 

Let’s take a closer look at what is happening at least at the European level in the early childhood field, the scientific domain that focuses on studying and addressing the first period of life of an individual – pre-natal to 8 years of age, a period with a tremendous impact on the child’s healthy development and well-being.

 

What are the main and current narratives there and to what extent could they be expanded beyond the young ages, while keeping at the heart the child’s best interest?

 

Here are only a few affirmations that are currently the main drivers in shaping and improving the early childhood systems pertinent to all levels of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system. As a reflective exercise, we propose the following demand: How relevant are they for the systems addressing older age groups, beyond childhood?

 

• Child development needs to be addressed in a holistic way. The progress in one developmental domain impacts the advancements in the others. The holistic perspective on a child’s development counter balanced the too ‘care’-focused approach in service provision in the first two years of a child’s life and the too academic-focus during the pre-primary years. The child needs a constant concern for their holistic development, no matter the age.
  The lack of continuity in addressing equally and appropriately across age groups the child’s ‘even’ need for physical, nutritional and health, social-emotional, cognitive development as a rounded person, was recognized as being a major obstacle in building a strong foundation for children’s healthy rounded development. The child’s holistic development became one of main ingredients in the dominant narratives of the experts in the field.
  This has impacted the way the early childhood education and care services (including parenting support) are to be designed and provided, from curriculum to staff preparation and continuous development, from policy regulations to daily programmes in services. However, this holistic perspective has not been embraced with the same intensity by all sectors – education, health, social protection and also has not been implemented with the same accuracy within and across sectors.

 

• A holistic view on the child’s development requires a holistic view on the family’s well-being. Different aspects of family life directly impact child development and well-being. The quality of the home environment affects the child’s healthy development – access to health services, family’s level of income, housing conditions, access to education, quality of neighbourhoods, etc. The interdependence between the different aspects of life is particularly stronger in the case of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged families. For example, in the case of families living in severe poverty, providing children with a nurturing environment is limited by the family opportunity to improve their life conditions. The family micro-system has to be supported by other micro-systems (health services, education services, cultural services, social assistance, community networks, etc.), and the quality of their interaction may contribute to improving the quality of the home environment for the child.

 

• A child and family-centered approach is a pre-requisite for designing and implementing quality services and for improving them. Low access to services and low outcomes in children’s development may indicate not only that services might not be within the reach or affordable to families, but also that they are misaligned with or non-responsive to children’s and families’ needs and demands, they are shaped and function based on mindsets that to a great extent ignore the actual views and needs of the children and families that they serve. The departing point in re-thinking/improving the current services is learning about children’s and families’ views, understandings and needs, and jointly developing plans for improving the quality of services.

 

• The 360˚ view on child and family needs require collaboration, cooperation and coordination between professionals, services and levels of governance when addressing them.
  There is strong agreement among early childhood experts (Geinger et al., 2015) that fragmentation is one of the problems to be addressed within early childhood systems: across age groups, across sectors, across services, across levels of governance and policies. The historical legacy of different (national and local) authorities governing different sectors across all age groups – from infancy to senior ages (health, education, social protection, etc.) led to services that are addressing the same children and families in parallel without communicating, cooperating and without coordination.
  In the case of young children, especially the most vulnerable, this lack of cooperation and coordination is a missed opportunity to effectively and efficiently contribute to improving the quality of the home environment and of the support to parents, and therefore a missed opportunity for children right from the start of their life.
  There are many examples in various countries of how cooperation and coordination across age groups and services have been addressed at different levels of the system: professional level, institutional level, inter-institutional level, governance level.

 

Such narratives pertaining to an already consolidated ‘image of the child’, but also because of its intrinsic connection with the image of the family, have been built over the at least past two decades by bringing together research evidence, policy and practice examples from various countries, confirming that this is the way to move forward if we are to improve existing systems serving children and families. They are the current ingredients for consolidating a new collective mindset nurturing the further development of early childhood systems.

 

If such narratives were also in the mainstream thinking around older children, would education systems be/look differently? It might be the right time to work together, across sectors and across generations, on building such narratives.

 

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