Roosy Aulakh*

Govt Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, India

*Corresponding Author: Roosy Aulakh, Govt Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, India.

Received: July 01, 2021; Published: July 26, 2021

Citation: Roosy Aulakh. “Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development". Acta Scientific Paediatrics 4.8 (2021): 60-61.

We are all aware of the ‘Nature versus Nurture’ debate which has been ongoing since the conception of these two terminologies in 16th century. Epigenetics has, more or less. put an end to this debate ruling out the possibility of exclusiveness of effect of either of the two on human development. The thought that some human characteristics are a result of genetic make-up and the rest due to environmental influences doesn’t seem to hold ground. Epigenetics has revealed that genes don’t function with ‘free will’ and are in turn affected by the environmental influences, a concept well documented by team of researchers led by Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf at McGill University. Their experiments on rats showed that early life experiences can affect the functioning of genes having long term effects up to adulthood. Data, though limited, from studies on humans has supported this finding with an even more thought-provoking suggestion that epigenetic inheritance might indeed be possible and such a transgenerational epigenetic inheritance could tilt the balance towards Lamarckian inheritance from the well accepted Darwin’s Theory of genetic inheritance.

Bibliography

1. World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Fund, World Bank Group. “Nurturing care for early childhood development: a framework for helping children survive and thrive to transform health and human potential”. Geneva: World Health Organization (2018).
2. Heckman JJ. “Skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children”. Science5782 (2006): 1900-1902.
3. Mukherjee SB., et al. “Indian Academy of Pediatrics Position Paper on Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development”. Indian Pediatrics (2021).
4. Britto PR., et al. “Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development”. Lancet10064 (2017): 91-102.

Copyright: © 2021 Roosy Aulakh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.