All young children require affection, protection and nurture. This includes relationships with stable caregivers that support their developing psychological and social capacities, and ongoing interactions with encouraging adults that promote their language and cognitive development. As they grow, children require friendships with same-aged peers and to be members of social and cultural associations, including educational, play, social and/or religious groups. This sociality helps children acquire the behaviour and moral values expected of people in their society and equips children to become full participants in their communities.
During their development, the psychological, social and material needs of young children are best met by caregivers – a constant group of dedicated people, related to one another, in lifelong familytype groups. All children must have at least one person who uniquely loves them and has a deep vested, future-oriented interest in their wellbeing. Where these conditions are missing, every effort must be made to encourage, support or establish them as they are the sine qua non of optimal human development.
Poverty conditions – including lack of access to services, poor environmental conditions, inadequate material supplies, social instability, and overworked and demoralised caregivers – negatively affect children’s development. When this happens, children fail to grow to their expected level, they are more vulnerable to severe illness, they lack energy to engage with their environment and to actively learn about the world, they are insecure and clinging, and their physical and psychological development may be delayed or reduced. When these conditions persist unchanged for most of a child’s early years, they have permanent effects on children’s cognitive and social capacities.
During the early years, various aspects of a child’s development are vulnerable to environmental deficits. Children in the first few years of life are most susceptible to growth retardation, infectious diseases and injuries. They are especially vulnerable to developmental delay and adjustment difficulties if they are separated from familiar caregivers, by impoverished learning environments that fail to stimulate their cognitive and language development, and by experiences which damage their sense of identity and self-esteem.
HIV/AIDS exacerbates poverty effects on young children. It increases disabling deprivations suffered by young children because family livelihoods and employment incomes are lost when breadwinners become ill and die, and when already stretched family resources go to medical care for sick adults and are shared amongst affected kin. Young children may live with withdrawn, preoccupied and ill caregivers, they may lose their parents, and they may suffer social instability when they are moved from one home to another during a time in their lives when such loss and instability is most injurious for them.
This is why interventions for young children should support affectionate family caregiving, and continuity and stability, through access to essential services and association with social groups in the community, including faith groups, child care associations and the like.
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