Global Impacts on Childhood Social Development

This important book combines insights from disciplines as diverse as developmental psychopathology, pediatrics, and public policy to offer a detailed description of the impact of global crises such as armed conflict, climate change, and environmental degradation on the developing child.

The book explores both the direct harms of these crises as well as those caused indirectly including family separation, strained caregiving relationships, loss of cultural resources, and damage to children’s self-efficacy and emotion regulation abilities. Using case studies from the last few decades, the authors demonstrate the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate systems such as soil health, family cohesion, individual coping skills, nutrition availability, and economic policy, all with an eye to the urgent developmental processes unfolding within and around the child.

This text is core reading for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in child psychology, social work, public health, health care, public policy, and public affairs. Also, by offering several roadmaps by which individuals, organizations, communities, and nations may leverage resources at each level of a child’s ecology to support healthy development, this book will be of interest to professionals working in humanitarian sectors as well as leaders in global pediatrics.

Author Biography

Charles Oberg is pediatrician and Professor Emeritus in Public Health at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is an outspoken advocate for children’s rights and has an extensive teaching and research background in child development, pediatrics, and public health. Clinically, he has provided care to refugee and immigrant children both at home as well as abroad in low and middle income countries (LMIC).

Hopewell R. Hodges is an advanced doctoral student and PhD candidate in clinical and developmental psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. In addition to providing therapy to children and families exposed to multisystem stressors and traumas, she conducts community-based research on strategies to promote resilient development.