Global Impacts on Childhood Social Development: Building Resilience Amid Conflict, Environmental Degradation, and Climate Change

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.

This book explores both the direct harms of these crises and 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, healthcare, 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.

Charles Oberg is a Pediatrician and Professor Emeritus in Public Health at the University of Minnesota, United States. 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 and 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 and trainings on strategies to promote resilient development.