Imagine a child born in Pakistan today. As they are adults, they can only reach 41% of their potential due to the challenges they face, such as lack of access to good health, education and nutrition, early stimulation and reactive care, and safety and safety.
The most important loss of this potential occurs during the first years of life. It is as if a child started life with the potential of a high performance sports car, but because it does not get the right fuel, maintenance or training, it could only end up occurring like a dilapidated Dabba Suzuki, in less than half of its capacity.
Children who have the best start in life are more likely to be happy, productive and socially integrated. Consequently, the first years of life are extremely important in human development. This is a time when more than a million neural connections are formed every second while children interact with their environment – a rhythm to never be repeated.
The quality of the first experiences of a child, in particular the education and the stimulation he receives, makes an essential difference in brain development and establishes the basics of behavior, learning, health and, in the end, life opportunities.
This has early childhood a period of great opportunity, but also a great risk because when children do not have the right conditions for prospering, the consequences can be serious for them and their families, as well as for society as a whole.
A pioneering study of researchers from Aga Khan University and the University of British Columbia in Canada, published in the Quarterly Research newspaper in early childhood, studied the health of children’s development in the early years in Pakistan. The study questioned thousands of children from three to eight years old in 397 public schools in the Sindh and found that one in four children in Pakistan is at risk of bad development and one is at risk in at least one of the areas of development such as physical, social-movement or cognitive development.
The results have also shown that children who have experienced social drawbacks such as poverty, language, being in the minority and lower maternal training levels were more at risk of poor development.
We know that children growing up in poverty are faced with many challenges, including inadequate nutrition, dangerous housing conditions and a scarcity of possibilities to play and learn, often have physical and mental health problems. Beyond these physical conditions, parental stress resulting from income insecurity and lack of education also has a negative impact on family dynamics, parental styles and daily interactions with children.
Worse still, these children who face unfavorable early childhood conditions are more likely to transmit these deprivation in future generations, continuing the intergenerational cycle of poverty.
Children speaking only non -dominant languages other than Ourdou, Sindhi and Punjabi in the study proved to be more badly in social skills and cognitive development and language. Research has shown that children’s development and well-being are positively impacted when they learn and receive care in their mother tongue.
In addition, protective factors such as the richness of households, higher levels of maternal education and a stimulating family environment characterized by activities such as reading, narration and play were less frequent in houses where a minority or native language was spoken.
These problems, inadequate nutrition and dangerous houses in parental stress and the language barrier, are not isolated problems. Instead, they highlight a systemic problem. Evidence shows that in countries where social and human development is not hierarchical, children remain at risk of bad development or not to achieve their full development potential. These drawbacks mean that some children are forced to gain more weight and jump more obstacles than others in the breed of life, creating excessive stress and pressure on children, their families and their descendants. This leads to wondering – Is it a child’s fault to be born in a poor family? The answer is obviously, absolutely not. So, the urgent question then becomes: what steps can we, as a community and nation, take to level these regulations of the game, really giving all the children the strong beginning they deserve?
There is a proverb that you need a village to raise a child. In Pakistan, with our strong collective cultural orientation and our deeply rooted values of community life, our communities are only well placed to be this “village”. This could simply start by establishing early and community -based learning centers, using easily available spaces such as a Madrassa, a mosque, a wedding hall or even a room or a balcony in a neighbor’s house. In these spaces, reading circles, history hours and game groups could be offered in local languages in accordance with our various cultural traditions of Pakistan in addition to the exchange of ideas and advice to add to the daily routine of a child to enrich care. These programs, being deeply anchored in the local community, also offer a safe and accessible space for families, especially women, to bring their children and in turn encourage the empowerment of women. In the end, these basic efforts can be further strengthened and institutionalized thanks to partnerships between the government, private organizations and university establishments, ensuring sustainability and long -term impact. An appropriate example of this model is the development centers of early childhood in the distant villages of Chitral. These examples show that coordinated basic efforts of civil society can play a crucial role by giving children in Pakistan a beginning of life that they deserve and could also supplement government’s efforts in this regard.
Investing in the early years is not only an idea of well-being; It is the intelligent economy. Global estimates show that for each roupie that we spend for the early development of a child – things like good nutrition, early learning and a safe and stimulating environment – we can expect a return 13 times.
Salima Kerai is a post-doctoral scholarship holder at the Center for Global Child Health, the Hospital for Sick Children
