What is “early relational health”? It’s a relatively new term for a long-held concept: Relationships are the biological foundation of child development, and when those bonds are healthy and stable, they create the best conditions for learning and growth from birth to age five.
Playing, singing and reading together are just a few examples of simple actions that lead to moments of connection, promoting a young child’s flourishing and buffering against difficult experiences. Those safe and nurturing relationships are essential for human thriving.
“Early relational health is composed of millions of tiny interactions that occur between young children and the adults caring for them — smiles, coos and shared gazes,” says Margaret Kerr, an associate professor of Human Development & Family Studies (HDFS). “When those interactions are mostly safe, predictable and warm in the first five years of life, children learn that they can rely on others and their emotional needs will be met, which supports their lifelong learning, social skills, and physical and mental health.”
The importance of connection
The term “relational health” refers to “the quality of connection between people,” says Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician, an HDFS clinical professor and the Child Development Lab’s Outreach Faculty Fellow. While it’s valuable to focus on the individual in research, care and programming, it’s also important to examine the continuous interactions between individuals, faculty say.
“This isn’t really an optional part of healthy development, or something that you should worry about later,” says Geoffrey Brown, an HDFS professor and the Mary Sue and Mike Shannon Chair for Thriving Children and Families. “Of course there are always opportunities for people to flourish at any point in their lives. But even before infants can walk and talk, they are forming connections and developing relationships that can have long-lasting consequences for their health and well-being.”
At the School of Human Ecology, the concept of early relational health shows up in the research and outreach of many faculty members. Brown and Kerr both study caregiver-child attachment relationships, which Kerr calls “the foundation of early relational health because it’s all about the quality of the relationship between young children and their caregivers in the first years of life.”
Faculty also collaborate with leaders in the field both on campus and across the country, including UW–Madison’s Center for Innovations in Parent-Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health and the Nurture Connection national network focused on early relational health.
According to a 2023 Harvard University report, positive and consistent early relationships improve emotional regulation, decrease anxiety, increase displays of positive emotions and the ability to identify more complex emotions, and increase the ability to empathize with others.
There are impacts on physical and behavioral health, too. The same report highlighted a strengthened immune system, decreased risk for asthma, respiratory infections and cardiovascular disease, more consistent physical exercise, and healthier eating and sleep habits as benefits.
“Early relational health actively supports children’s growth in lots of domains and can help them to overcome other challenges and stressors in their lives,” Brown says.
In fact, a 2023 study in the journal Pediatrics linked a higher number of positive childhood experiences to better self-reported adult health and lower risk of mental and physical conditions, especially among people with fewer adverse childhood experiences.
Parents and other primary caregivers also benefit: The Harvard report describes similar improved outcomes as those seen in children, as well as decreased symptoms of depression and maternal anxiety, increased cardiac health and stress resilience, and higher levels of oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine — the “happy hormones” that help us regulate our mood and strengthen social bonds.
Most children are raised by more people than just their parents. Even in cases where a child’s primary caregiver is their mother or father, they’re typically surrounded by grandparents and other relatives, family friends and early child care providers. These relationships “provide the context in which young children experience trust and co-regulation; build and sustain secure attachment; and learn the concepts of social reciprocity,” according to a 2025 National Academies report on early relational health.
Families need more support
Human Ecology experts emphasize that supporting early relational health in children takes all of us — and benefits all of us, too.
“If I could change one thing, I would move our society away from the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality and toward universal, paid long-term support for new families,” Kerr says — things like increased funding for high-quality child care, extended parental and family leave, and resources for low-income families. “Raising our society’s next generation of children should be a collective responsibility, and not one that falls solely on parents and other caregivers.”
Brown argues that investments in early relational health are investments in society’s future.
“I’d like for individuals and institutions to stop thinking about commitments to early relational health as costs, and start thinking about them as critical opportunities that are likely to have huge payoffs for children, families and communities,” he says.
Experts stress that it’s much easier to provide a strong caregiving environment when parents are not struggling to provide for their own and their families’ basic needs.
“It’s really hard when someone understands the importance of sharing books daily with their child — and has the skills and confidence to do so — but they can’t do it because they have to work two jobs to make rent, and so they’re not home in the evening for those bedtime stories,” Navsaria says. “How do we support families with meaningful interventions such as living wages and affordable housing so they can do the great job of parenting that they know how to do and want to do?”
The pediatrician cautions that, while there are clearly harmful ways to parent a child — like physically hurting them or continuous harsh interactions — it’s important to remember that there’s no one “right” way. For example, not responding to a child in a particularly busy or chaotic moment is not going to harm the child.
“Letting your child cry for a moment is a normal, everyday and expected part of parenting, and it may actually be of long-term benefit,” Navsaria says.
That relational “rupture” followed by “repair” — moments of misunderstanding or conflict followed by reconnection — can lead to better resilience and stronger bonds. A toddler crying when their parent leaves them at child care learns that not only does their parent return, their love still exists even when they aren’t physically present.
It’s also a common misconception that parenting is “instinctual,” Navsaria says: “Some may learn how to interact well with young children passively by observing others, but if you don’t have that opportunity, you may have no idea how to do so. A common trap is to assume that such an adult doesn’t love or care for a child — instead, focus on careful, intentional skill-building with that adult.”
It’s not merely offering information about the value of talking, reading, singing and playing with children, he says, but addressing the “how” and bolstering the adult’s confidence in doing so.
“There’s a quote I love from one of the founders of attachment theory, John Bowlby, that says: ‘If we value our children, we must cherish their parents,’” Kerr says. “To me, this says everything that I want others to know. In addition to caring about babies and children, we need to support parents so they can provide high-quality caregiving.”
Long-standing expertise in the science of thriving children and families
Since its origins in 1903 as the Department of Home Economics, the School of Human Ecology has been home to scholars who devote their careers to better understanding child development and teaching students about these concepts. While this article highlights just a few of our school’s experts in early relational health, we encourage you to explore related interest areas of Human Development & Family Studies department faculty, such as fatherhood, parental burnout, mindfulness, prenatal well-being and the effects of policy on child and youth development.
In 2026, the School of Human Ecology is marking 100 years of its Child Development Lab, one of the first university-based preschool laboratories of its kind in the U.S., and celebrating its leading role in the field of early relational health.