Professor Pasco Fearon speaking on “The role of responsive caregiving in child development”

Professor Pasco Fearon Director, Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Research University of Cambridge, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at UCL, Director, Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Research University of Cambridge, speaking at Learnus's "FutureEd25" conference on: “The role of responsive caregiving in child development” The concept of parental sensitivity was originally formulated by Mary Ainsworth, based on extensive home observations of families in Uganda and the United States, as part of her efforts to understand the interactional determinants of attachment security. Since then, her findings have been consistently replicated in many studies across the world. In this talk, I will summarise this corpus of evidence and explore the breadth of outcomes associated with sensitive-responsive caregiving in both longitudinal studies and clinical trials. I will suggest that sensitivity plays a much broader role in early child development both longitudinal studies and clinical trials. I will suggest that sensitivity plays a much broader role in early child development than previously assumed, and that interventions that improve sensitivity may produce improvements in multiple areas of early child development. While the primary implications of these findings relate to the home environment and preschool development, some key principles are relevant for educators concerned with children’s wellbeing at all ages.