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What is ECCD?
Early Childhood Care for Development: A Definition
Children do not just grow in size. They develop, evolve, and mature, mastering ever more complex understandings of the people, objects and challenges in their environment. There is a general pattern or sequence for development that is true of most children. However, the rate, character, and quality of development vary from child to child. Culture influences development in different ways, and the goals for children differ from culture to culture.
Early Childhood Care for Development (ECCD) refers not only to what is happening within the child, but also to the care that child requires in order to thrive. For a child to develop and learn in a healthy and normal way, it is important not only to meet the basic needs for protection, food and health care, but also to meet the basic needs for interaction and stimulation, affection, security, and learning through exploration and discovery.
ECCD activities are those that support young children appropriately and seek to strengthen the environments in which they live. ECCD includes:
- working with parents to strengthen parenting skills,
- working with siblings and other family members to recognize the specific developmental needs of younger children and what they can do to support them,
- working to provide or strengthen day care options,
- developing preschools and other early childhood education programs that address the child’s needs in holistic ways,
- striving to bolster the community in its economic, physical, and moral support of families and young children.
ECCD: A relatively new field of international focus
ECCD is a relatively new field and combines elements from the fields of child development, early childhood education, infant stimulation, health and nutrition, community development, parent education, women’s development, and economics. International ECCD arose from the recognition that these elements all interact within a young child’s life. If we want to support young children and help them to thrive, then we need to understand the many facets of their development, and also address the contexts in which they are living.
When discussing Early Childhood Care for Development (ECCD), it is important to have a common understanding of what is meant by the term. There are three parts to the phrase: early childhood–care–for development:
Early Childhood
As it is currently used internationally, early childhood is defined as the period of a child’s life from conception to age eight. There are two reasons for including this age range within a definition of ECCD. First, this time frame is consistent with developmental psychology’s view of the continuum of children’s development. Children below the age of eight learn best when they have objects they can manipulate; when they have chances to explore the world around them; when they can experiment and learn from trial-and-error within a safe and stimulating environment. At about the age of nine they begin to view the world differently. They can manipulate ideas and learn concepts mentally and are less dependent on objects. Thus in terms of learning theory, the birth through age eight time period presents a developmental continuum.
Second, the international definition of early childhood includes the early primary years (ages six—eight) because of the importance of the transition for children either from home or from a pre- school program into the primary school. If pre-school programs for children are to be effective, there needs to be some interface between what happens in the pre-school and lower primary school. This does not mean that early childhood programs should become formal experiences for young children. Rather, there is a need for early primary teachers to become more aware of the experiences, skills and knowledge that children bring with them into the primary school if they have had an early childhood program experience.
Care
In the 1980s, the term care was added to the phrase early childhood development. This was in recognition of the fact that young children need care and nurturing. They need attention to their health and nutrition, their evolving emotional and social abilities, as well as their minds. The term care was chosen, rather than education, to move policy makers and program providers away from thinking exclusively in terms of pre-schooling.
Development
In the definition of ECCD being used throughout this site, development is defined as the process of change in which the child comes to master more and more complex levels of moving, thinking, feeling and interacting with people and objects in the environment. Development involves both a gradual unfolding of biologically determined characteristics and the learning process. Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, habits and values through experience and experimentation, observation, reflection, and/or study and instruction.
Both the child’s physical growth (the child’s health and nutrition history and current health and nutritional status) and the child’s intellectual, emotional and social growth are crucial in the child’s overall development. The child’s current developmental status either facilitates or inhibits future learning. Thus learning is part of the development process.
For more information on definitions in the field of Early Childhood, see: UNESCO Policy Briefs:
Early Childhood Care? Development? Education?
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