Early Relational Health Building Foundations for Child, Family, and Community Well-Being (2025) / Chapter Skim
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2 Understanding Early Relational Health
2 Understanding Early Relational Health
Pages 19-39
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From page 19... ...
Finally, it asserts that an early relational health lens reorients attention to promoting positive childhood experiences. During its review, the committee noted three important caveats: First, much of the available research has focused on the family structure and values of middle-class European-heritage families.
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From page 20... ...
. In sum, childhood is not destiny, but childhood experiences provide a foundation for future growth and development.
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From page 21... ...
. Biobehavioral synchrony can occur across the life course and across relational partners beyond the parent/caregiver– infant/child relationship (Konrad & Puetz, 2024; Yoon et al., 2021)
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From a strictly biological standpoint, buffering adversity is all about the repair." EARLY SENSITIVE PERIOD OF DEVELOPMENT Relational health begins in preconception, continues prenatally, and evolves throughout the lifespan. However, there is a sensitive period early in life when the biological systems that are necessary to support optimal life course relational health develop.
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From page 23... ...
Related, yet distinct relational concepts include secure attachments; caregiver sensitivity; interactions with mutuality; shared attunement; biobehavioral synchrony; family resilience and connection; positive or benevolent childhood experiences; and safe, stable, and nurturing relationships. These diverse theoretical constructs ultimately converge in their shared objective of describing distinct facets of relationships that develop over time through moments of connection.
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From page 24... ...
. In the 1970s, Tronik's still face experiment studied mother–infant face-to-face interactions and found that even young infants are able to attend to social interactions and are actively involved in the coregulation process with their caregiver.
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. Some work has also suggested that other maternal behaviors, such as responsiveness, also predict child attachment (de Wolff & van Ijzendoorn, 1997; Nievar & Becker, 2008)
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. This capacity, in turn, depends on at least four functions (emotional empathy, empathic concern, cognitive empathy, and emotional regulation)
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Over the course of child development and into adolescence, the locus of emotional regulation moves from the caregiver (predictably responsive care) , to coregulation through biobehavioral synchrony and the expectation of repair, and eventually to the child (self-regulation)
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From page 28... ...
. Extended family relationships provide social-emotional and child-rearing support for both children and parents, practical resources, and a sense of cultural connectedness that can provide children with a sense of rootedness and help mitigate the negative impacts of racism-related stress (Hill, 1972; Iruka et al., 2025; McBride Murry et al., 2023)
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Finally, there is a growing body of research examining linkages between early relational health and later physical health outcomes (for additional discussion, see Ehrlich & Cassidy, 2021)
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. Early Relational Health and Children's Brain Development Neuroscientific evidence has shown that sensitive caregiving in early life supports the healthy development of the neurobiology responsible for emotion regulation and stress responses.
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Toxic stress refers to strong, frequent, and/or prolonged activation of the body's stress response that results in an adverse long-term impact because it is chronic, uncontrollable, and/or occurs in the absence of positive relational support (see also Garner et al., 2021)
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From page 32... ...
. Although toxic stress responses -- sustained exposure to the physiologic mediators of stress due to persistent or extreme adversity in the absence of adequate social-emotional protective factors -- might explain some of the associations between adverse childhood experiences and poor outcomes decades later, adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress are not synonymous.
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From page 33... ...
Buffering Effects on Stress Biology and Physical Health There is a growing body of research showing that early relational health buffers the effects of global and specific stressors on children's stress biology and physical health. Beginning with global stress indices, more positive parenting and less negative parenting buffered the effects of cumulative risk on epigenetic age acceleration in young children (Sullivan et al., 2023)
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. Similarly, parent–child relationship quality buffered the association between mothers' adverse childhood experiences and their toddler's stress physiology (Gray et al., 2025)
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. EARLY RELATIONAL HEALTH AND POSITIVE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES As described above, much more is known about adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress than about positive childhood experiences and early relational health.
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From page 36... ...
. • Positive childhood experiences serve as protective factors for mental health in pandemic-era youth with adverse childhood experiences (Samji et al., 2024)
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From page 37... ...
. Furthermore, this body of research suggests that the absence of family resilience and connection and positive childhood experiences is independently associated with poorer child flourishing and school readiness/engagement and with greater child and adult mental and physical health problems (Bethell, Gombojav, & Whitaker, 2019; Bethell, Jones, et al., 2019)
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From page 38... ...
Positive Childhood Experiences Score (Bethell, Jones, et al., 2019) How much as a child they… 1.
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From page 39... ...
The inherent plasticity of the young brain means that early childhood experiences, both positive and negative, have an oversized ability to influence the long-term structure and function of the brain. This view emphasizes the role of protective factors in promoting positive adaptation despite adversity.
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