The Gillings School studies early childhood needs to prevent maltreatment and support thriving families, ensuring children have the best start in life.
It’s undeniable that the first years of life are critically important when it comes to a child’s long-term well-being. Experiencing disadvantage, trauma or neglect in the first eight years of life has an outsized impact on a person, while growing up in healthy and stimulating environments lays the foundation for a more stable and healthy life.
Researchers at the Gillings School are studying the unique needs of early childhood from many angles with one goal: giving children the best possible start in life.
“The brain develops so rapidly during these early childhood years. It’s really important for children to be in nurturing and stimulating environments in order to create healthy neurological pathways,” said Meghan Shanahan, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health.
“The brain develops so rapidly during these early childhood years. It’s really important for children to be in nurturing and stimulating environments in order to create healthy neurological pathways.”
– Meghan Shanahan
Shanahan studies the prevention of child maltreatment – or abuse and neglect – and evaluates how preventing these adverse childhood events optimizes health and well-being. She studies interventions at both the policy and family levels.
“I firmly believe that most parents love their children and don’t want to hurt them. And children love their parents, too, and want to be raised by them,” said Shanahan. “Adverse childhood events increase the risk of many chronic diseases, so if we can equip parents to parent well and help get more children off to a great start, we’re going to improve our physical and mental health at a population level.”
Early in her career, Shanahan collaborated with Desmond Runyan, MD, MPH, a former professor of social medicine and pediatrics at the UNC School of Medicine and professor emeritus of pediatrics at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, on a campaign aimed at educating new parents about the period of purple crying. The period of purple crying refers to the early weeks of an infant’s life when there may be an increase in crying for no apparent reason, and the campaign warned parents about the related dangers of shaking a baby. The work was well-funded and included bedside teaching at every birthing hospital in North Carolina, but it failed to reduce abusive head trauma.
For Shanahan, this points to the fact that education and one-on-one programmatic approaches alone can’t reduce child maltreatment. Family stress is often thought to be a precipitating factor for abuse and neglect. To counteract this, Shanahan believes that it is important to create a context that is supportive of parenting through policies. About 75% of the cases investigated by Child Protective Services are not for abuse but for neglect, which includes failure to provide proper supervision, clothing or food to a child. These are often scenarios in which investing in a vulnerable family so that they have the support they need – like access to health care, food and high-quality child care – can prevent neglect.
About 75% of the cases investigated by Child Protective Services are not for abuse, but for neglect, which includes failure to provide proper supervision, clothing or food to a child.
Shanahan’s study on the period of purple crying, funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, coincided with results out of Vancouver on the period of purple crying that did show a reduction in abusive head trauma. Thus the CDC’s technical package on how to prevent child maltreatment includes information regarding how to create a supportive environment for children and families, of which policies are a critical part.
Iheoma U. Iruka, PhD, professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health, studies early childhood development with a focus on issues related to parent-child and teacher-child interactions.
Iruka grew up in poverty in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended a public exam school for grades seven through 12, and early in life it became her goal to earn a doctoral degree. However, she noticed that many of her peers, especially Black males, who came from similar backgrounds had left the school by the ninth grade. She wanted to understand what factors were at work and why many of her peers struggled in school. Once in graduate school, she started to focus on early childhood development and the interconnected systems that make up a young child’s world.
“We know that young children need high-quality early care and educational programming, but there are a lot of stressors outside of school environments that can’t be fully overcome by educational programming. So we can’t think of this in silos where we separate education out from the other factors that shape a child’s development, health and learning,” said Iruka.
A child’s environments are all highly interconnected, because things like access to high-quality early education also provide stable child care that enables parents to hold down jobs and provides economic and health benefits to families. Similarly, access to health care allows for earlier diagnoses and access to services if a child has autism or needs additional services like speech, physical or occupational therapy. Early access to services has a huge impact on outcomes, and the cost to families and society becomes much higher with late diagnosis and treatment.
“My research prioritizes the needs of children who are facing barriers like racism, discrimination, disability and intergenerational poverty. And it’s impossible to fully support children without supporting the primary adults and caregivers in their lives,” said Iruka. “But the policies that really move the needle for the most vulnerable children – things like family medical leave that supports early parent-child bonding, access to quality health insurance, access to early intervention services, income support and access to high-quality early education – help so many people and our society as a whole.”
Iruka, Shanahan and many other researchers in the Gillings School are focused on protecting children and setting them up to thrive. There are many factors that affect a child’s well-being from the prenatal stage all the way through early childhood. The Gillings School’s research seeks to identify the best solutions at each stage to prevent maltreatment, support caregivers and families, provide quality early care and education, and more, so that all children can have the best possible start in life.
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