Early childhood health and education: Policies and interventions to promote child well-being

The early years of childhood represent a crucial window of opportunity for investments in skills or capabilities that can place children on the path to well-being in adulthood. Many recent studies in the last decade have focused on the importance of early human capital investments in academic and social skills for promoting long-term educational and economic success. The chapters in this volume explicitly examine the role of health - another type of human capital - in promoting children's early and later educational success and well-being. The impacts of health and education outcomes of salient programs, policies, and practices are summarized with an emphasis on policy implications. The chapters present conceptual issues, research findings, and program and policy implications of promoting good health and school readiness in the first five years of life. These chapters were written by leading researchers in the multidisciplinary study of early learning and human capital formation and represent revised and updated versions of presentations made at a national invitational conference that was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in late 2010. The book addresses three important themes. The first is the integration of both early health and education as important building blocks of current and later child well-being. Health practices and behaviors interact with educational and social experiences to affect outcomes for children and families. A variety of determinants of child and adult well-being such as prenatal care, family poverty, and access to high-quality early learning programs express their influence early in life yet are often investigated in isolation from each other. This is due in part to the fragmentation of fields of inquiry and the allocation of resources and funding.