Early Child Development as Primary Prevention of Crime: a
Canadian and International Perspective
Three domains of early child development influence human
well-being over the life course: physical health and development,
cognitive and language development, and social/emotional development.
Each domain crosses over and influences all domains of human
well-being later on. We have created health care systems that provide
primary prevention and developmental support in the physical domain,
and schools that focus on cognitive and language development. But
Western countries have not mounted a societal response to address
social/emotional development. Instead, we react to failures in this
realm with punitive institutions. Bringing a developmental perspective
to bear on the question of crime reveals this lack of a progressive
societal response. Our work in Canada suggests that the response needs
to be multi-faceted: addressing factors ranging from parenting style
to community cohesion. This presentation will deal with the challenges
of bringing social/emotional development into the mainstream, using
our early child development mapping work in British Columbia, Canada,
as a case study.
