Different is not deficient: respecting diversity in early childhood development

“Poor brain development” in the global South? Challenging the science of early childhood interventions

“…It is hard to see any scientific standard that would grant such a generalization from two small studies in very specific settings to the “developing world” as a whole. But it is in line with a thorough deficit view wherein differences from WEIRD norms are classified by default as deficits (Akhtar and Jaswal, 2013; Scheidecker et al., 2022). If deficits are the only recognized characteristics of families in the global South, they appear all the same.…”

“…Finally, to ensure that such critical work reaches the intended audience, it needs to be published or prominently referenced in the medical outlets of the ECD field. As trials for such a strategy, we expressed some of our ethnography‐derived critique through commentaries about specific ECD articles in the British Medical Journal Global Health (Scheidecker, Oppong, et al., 2021) and The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Scheidecker et al., 2022). A group of medical anthropologists and psychiatrists articulated their concerns in the perspectives section of T he Lancet (Lachman et al., 2021).…”

“…Concerning the global South, they refer to a limited number of assessment and intervention studies. The assessment of ECD rests mainly on psychometric tests and surveys about childcare such as UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (see McCoy et al., 2022 as an example; Scheidecker et al., 2022 for a commentary). The researchers compare resulting data across continents, countries, and within‐country wealth quintiles to support the basic claim that poverty is caused by inadequate childcare and suboptimal development.…”

“…Their critical commentary about an ECD intervention study in Senegal resulted in a sequence of mutually responding publications about the science and ethics of global ECD (Weber et al., 2017; Morelli, Bard, et al., 2018; Weber et al., 2021; Scheidecker, Oppong, et al., 2021). A recent commentary demonstrates severe methodological biases in ECD assessment research (Scheidecker et al., 2022). While these publications represent the first critical engagements with global ECD, many more are needed to bring the critical potential of available ethnographic expertise to the fore.…”

“…To be sure, the global ECD knowledge base also includes some studies about populations in the global South. These studies, which focus on the assessment of supposed deficits and intervention effects, depend entirely on concepts and standards that they derive from research in WEIRD contexts, as we have outlined elsewhere (Scheidecker et al., 2022; Scheidecker, Oppong, et al., 2021). Taken together, these critiques demonstrate that global ECD relies on basic research that has been conducted in the global North and on some biased assessment studies in the global South while excluding any basic research about childrearing and child development in the targeted communities.…”