Child Development

Research indicates that children’s healthy development is essential to school readiness, academic success, and overall well-being. Services that support young children’s healthy development can reduce the prevalence of developmental and behavioral disorders that have high costs and long-term consequences for health, education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. Additionally, a growing body of evidence suggests that prevention and early intervention are substantially less costly than life-long special education and treatment.
NASHP is at the forefront of examining how states identify, implement, test and spread policy and system changes that promote healthy development for children.  Since 2000, the Assuring Better Child Health and Development (ABCD) program has helped 27 states create models of service delivery and financing through a laboratory for program development and innovation. NASHP’s child development areas focus particularly on preventive care of children, whose health care is covered by state health care programs, especially Medicaid.
NASHP’s ABCD Resource Center, which provides state policymakers, primary care providers and other child and family service providers with easy access to research and resources that they can use to promote early childhood health and development is available at the ABCD Resource Center link to the right. The resource center was funded by The Commonwealth Fund.