Our Mission

We’re uncovering the science of early childhood relationships to transform child development, family health, and strengths-based pediatric practice. 

The Center for Early Relational Health leads the nation’s most comprehensive research on early relationships, to pioneer scientific understanding of the mechanisms of early relational health (ERH) and its impacts on child development and outcomes. 

Far from “mushy” science, we conduct rigorous multimodal, computational, interdisciplinary research to interconnect large, longitudinal data sets. Understanding that early relationships influence the emergence of a healthy child, the center is dedicated to translating this hard science into innovations in primary prevention best practices. 

By transforming universal pediatric care through research, education, and practice — we can make evidence-based, real-world change at a population level. 

American Families Face Public Health Crises 

In 2021, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) called for a field-wide paradigm shift toward parent/caregiver-child relational health, promoting safe, stable, nurturing relationships as “biological necessities for all children.” Yet the U.S. simultaneously faces a youth mental health crisis and a population-wide epidemic of loneliness. 

Early Relational Health (ERH) Offers Solutions, but We Need Interventions for Clinical Care

We know that positive interactions with parents/caregivers powerfully impact children’s (and therefore, families') lifelong well-being. Yet the Center for ERH’s 2022 fieldwide meta-analysis of relational interventions to improve health and development outcomes revealed something shocking: not a single dyadic ERH intervention is ready for implementation into pediatric clinical care. 

This finding helped crucially narrow the spotlight for the field of ERH: to develop relational interventions, we need relational evidence. The field of pediatrics is uniquely poised to work together with families to promote early relationships, with enormous potential for improving population-wide health outcomes. But to meet that potential, we need concrete ERH science. That’s why the center is building the evidence base for the field of ERH. 

A Crucial Need To Understand the Mechanisms of Early Relationships

While we can be confident that connection is both protective and healing, the scientific mechanism of what actually happens between two individuals in relationship remains almost entirely unknown. Understanding and harnessing the early, innate power of relationships will allow us to develop and equip pediatricians with the interventions needed to move into an era of universal strengths-based pediatric practice. 

The Center for ERH will accomplish this mission through 4 strategic pillars:

1. The Scientific Strategy: focuses on creating foundational knowledge of ERH (and its implications for life-course health, well-being, and socioemotional functioning) to build the evidence-base for future clinical best practices that embed ERH into universal pediatric care. 
2. The Educational Strategy: both trains the next generation of leaders in pediatric research and practice, and educates the public on important research findings. 
3. The Direct-to-Family Strategy: actively connects with families, to support them in tangible ways outside of our research mission 
4. The Field-Building Strategy: focuses on partnering with organizations and collaborators across and beyond Columbia, to galvanize actionable change, based on evidence, toward stronger ERH nationwide. 

Through this comprehensive approach, the Center for ERH aims to usher in a new era in pediatrics: one in which pediatric care providers are given the evidence, training, and tools to study and support ERH-focused precision medicine. 

Key Topics of Interest 

The center dedicates a major portion of its effort to understanding the scientific mechanisms of how strong, supportive early relationships form, under what conditions they develop, and what they predict about the life course health and wellbeing of a child. This means looking at human connection from all angles, starting as early in life as possible (even during pregnancy). 

Here are some of the questions the center is investigating through its scientific work: 

• What happens in the space between two people?
  • How can we scientifically define the “magnetism” between us? How does it develop in early life? 
  • What are the units of information (neurological, biological, and otherwise) transferred between two people in relationship, and how? 
• Why do some people sync up with each other, while others don’t?
  • Can we encourage two bodies/brains to sync more? 
  • Should we encourage this, even in families? 
• How does each construct of early relational health map onto future health outcomes?
  • Do certain relational constructs (attachment, bonding, etc.) influence certain health factors in individuals? In relationships? 
  • Do certain relational constructs influence each other’s effects? 
• How do we make children more resilient? And families? And society?
  • Why are certain human beings resilient to stress, while others are vulnerable to it? 
  • How much should we really be protecting children from stress? 
• What is the interplay between individual resilience and social resilience?
  • ​​​​​​​How much can we grow as individuals, and how much does our growth depend on each other? 
  • How do relationships support resilience? 
  • If we increase connectedness, are we decreasing/devaluing individualism? 
• How can we prioritize family and clinician voices in researching and supporting early relational health? 

To answer these (and further) questions, the center uses cutting-edge technologies such as measuring heart rate synchrony between moms and babies, body mapping of emotions during interactions, machine vision to understand microsecond interactions, and simultaneous brain imaging of parents/caregivers and children (Columbia is one of two places in the world with this capability).