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Infants and toddlers are experiencing the COVID pandemic during a critical developmental period. Although current information indicates young children are no more likely than adults to contract the virus, they’re still feeling tremendous effects from COVID on their development. Yet their needs have been virtually absent from policy conversations around the virus.
Even before the pandemic, far too many infants and toddlers and their families faced significant adversity during these early critical years due to centuries of policies that excluded and disregarded people of color, many of which still exist today. The alarming disparities in health outcomes and economic stability, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic, are a direct result of systemic racism in policies—a public health crisis in its own right.
This new brief unpacks the impacts of systemic racism on children’s development and describes how the coronavirus pandemic has magnified pervasive inequities in health, education, employment, and other factors across race and ethnicity. The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated long-standing problems with policies across the range of needs for infants, toddlers, and their families.
To address these shortfalls, we recommend a combination of immediate, COVID-specific actions and longer-term policy reform. These recommendations span federal and state policies, with recognition that much of what needs to happen requires action at both levels. The federal government needs to allocate significant funding for meaningful change to occur.
This brief recommends centering the voices of people with lived experiences to tackle historically racist and discriminatory policies and address the dual crises this country is currently experiencing in a way that best meets the needs of those who are most harmed. By doing so, we can look back years from now with the knowledge that the babies and toddlers of today grew up knowing how much their lives were valued.
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Infants, toddlers & families of color are already being harmed by racist policies. The pandemic is only making it worse. New @CLASP_DC report explores those inequities and offers policy recommendations. https://www.clasp.org/publications/report/brief/pandemic-within-pandemic-how-coronavirus-and-systemic-racism-are-harming
Want to know more about the impact of COVID on infants, toddlers and families of color? Check out this new brief from @CLASP_DC https://www.clasp.org/publications/report/brief/pandemic-within-pandemic-how-coronavirus-and-systemic-racism-are-harming
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