The Biological and Social Determinants of Child Development

Book excerpt: The Biological and Social Determinants of Child Development stimulates cross-disciplinary communication and research collaboration in the field of child development. While the papers in this issue seem diverse in terms of topic and discipline, there are a number of common themes: *critical period for brain development and the importance of specific environmental input during this period; *importance of early brain development and enriched environments is supported in articles describing findings from human studies; *potential for brain plasticity following specialized retraining is found in a compelling paper demonstrating different profiles of brain activation for normal readers vs. those who have dyslexia and younger children at high risk for development of reading disabilities; and *critical period, brain plasticity, and parallel changes in developing behavior and brain structure and functioning. As a number of papers in this issue describe potential interventions, one is relevant because it describes the numerous factors that make results of such studies have the potential to generalize to larger populations. Putting the described papers in a broad perspective, the last article argues that we cannot understand the health status of a society without understanding the health-determining influences across the life course.