Promoting Positive Development in Early Childhood Building Blocks for a Successful Start

This new volume in the Search Institute Series on Developmentally Attentive Community and Society represents a milestone in Search Institute’s signature work on the Developmental Assets that children and adolescents need in their lives to succeed. Through the research behind this book, Karen VanderVen links this strength-based, community-based approach to human development to early childhood development and practice. In doing so, she advances a lo- term vision of understanding child and adolescent development not merely as a series of discrete stages, but as a trajectory of development in which experiences in each phase of development link to, reinforce, or redirect experiences in other aspects of life. To be sure, VanderVen explores with both breadth and depth a parti- larly critical time in child development: the early childhood years, ages 3–5. The latest research in numerous ?elds has only increased our understanding of how important it is for communities to attend to children’s developmental expe- ences in these crucial years. Positive development in early childhood leads young people on a path to a healthy adulthood; and a lack of positive dev- opment in early childhood has a blunting effect that extends into elementary and secondary schooling years.