Charles Bruner and Kay Johnson, 12/21/20, positiveexperience.org/blog
Our country and the world are eager to move toward the coming new year. In 2020, the triple crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic downturn, and reckoning on racism have elevated attention to social injustice in both the health care system and our country as a whole. Because of COVID-19, the public and policy leaders have heightened awareness of the importance of physicians, nurses, community health workers, child care providers, teachers, and others who support the health and well-being of young children and their families. While COVID-19 has had its major medical impacts upon older Americans and Americans with disabilities, it has disrupted the lives of children and their families and, without concerted and intentional responses, threatens to have its greatest long-term impacts upon children – in their physical, mental, social, and behavioral health and development.
This comes even as, before COVID-19, too many U.S. children—through the poverty, racism, isolation, stress, discrimination, or marginalization of their families and communities—do not receive the services and supports they need to succeed. This results in profound disparities in opportunity unfairly based upon a child’s socio-economic status, zip code, and/or race/ethnicity. Currently, none of the systems serving children—health care, economic assistance, early care and education, and family support—has sufficient resources to provide high-quality, effective services to all. The federal government has a critical leadership opportunity to invest in these systems, in partnership with states and communities, and to equip the child- serving fields to move toward a new and better standard of practice.
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