Children's Environmental Exposures in Early Care & Learning: Preventing Harm Through Emerging Initiatives and Best Practices

The environments in which children spend time have a vital impact on their health, development, and ability to learn.  Providing environmentally-healthy, low-toxic settings is particularly important in the places children spend the majority of their time.  Understanding the impact of exposure to chemicals of concern on children’s health and development, and preventing such exposures, should be integral to professionals and institutions of early care and education (ECE).

How well is ECE integrating the emerging scientific findings on pediatric environmental health into existing policies and practices?  Early care and learning institutions  -- such as state child care licensing standards, state quality improvement systems, and child care resource and referral agency professional development offerings -- may briefly address one or two discrete environmental issues such as lead or radon.  Environmental health is rarely addressed comprehensively.

Several forward-looking initiatives, pilots and best practices in policy and practice are illustrating how to integrate environmental health.  One state has comprehensively incorporated environmental health into its quality improvement system and is offering mini-grants to providers to address identified environmental health hazards. Professional development on environmental health and best practices for child care trainers, licensing staff and consultants, has been shown to be effective. A national science-based endorsement program recognizes child care providers who adopt best practices; more than 2,100 providers have been endorsed. 

The field is poised to recognize this vital facet of child health and development.

This presentation will provide an overview of current environmental health programs, activities and practices in early care and learning.