Integration of Motor, Cognitive, Nutritional, Metabolic, and Epigenetic Influence Variables Related to Early Childhood as a Tool to Promote Child Development at Kindergarten Schools

Abstract

Child development comprises interdependent dimensions which embrace physiological adjustments to disturbances caused by epigenetic modulations of genes in response to physical and social environmental influences, which, in turn, shape the health of children during their development, and reflect on their learning, behavior, and physical and mental well-being through their life span. It is a dynamic process in which children turns from a totally dependent on their caregiver to a human being who responds to one who perceptions in a planned, organized, and independent way. Promoting the conditions for a children’s healthy development depends on knowing how it manifests in different aspects through their development. In the present work, cognition, motricity, nutrition, metabolism, and epigenetics during child development were studied in an integrative and multidisciplinary manner based on the last 40 years of research on child development; with the use of sensitive periods as parameters, whose plasticity is greater than in any other period in life, and which is translated into windows of opportunity for healthy interventions to suggest stimuli according to a specific milestone, democratizing such knowledge, thus making it accessible and functional to parents, teachers, and caregivers of children from zero to 6 years of age.