Harvard Center on the Developing Child: Online Resource Library
Photo by IIONA VIRGIN
The Harvard University Center on the Developing Child offers an online Resource Library, searchable by topic, format or specific titles.
The site is regularly updated. Current featured resources include:
A March 2025 Solutions Spotlight podcast and webinar on How Communities are Leading Efforts to Ensure Clean Water Access
A January 2025 article for US Children’s Health Month on The Importance of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
Searchable topic headings for resources on the site include:
Adult Capabilities
Brain Architecture
Developmental Environments
Epigenetics
Executive Function
Extreme Heat
Individual Differences
Lifelong Health and Wellbeing
Mental Health
Neglect
News
Play
Program Evaluation
Racism
Resilience
Serve and Return
Timing and Critical Periods
Toxic Stress
Water
The site also offers a series of Resource Guides exploring concepts and topics in more detail. Each guide offers resource materials in a variety of formats (e.g. podcasts, articles, infographics, videos, etc.) along with links to related topics on the Resource sites. The Resource Guides include:
A Guide to Brain Architecture: Learn how the brain is built from the bottom up. Early experiences and interactions shape early cognitive, social and emotional abilities that form the foundation of lifelong health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Serve and Return: Learn how responsive, back-and-forth exchanges between a young child and a caring adult play a role in shaping brain architecture.
A Guide to Toxic Stress: Learn how toxic stress - which can occur with excessive or prolonged activation of our stress response systems - can impact early childhood development and how we can address it.
A Guide to Lifelong Health and Wellbeing: Learn how positive early experiences shape brain architecture and all our developing biological systems, laying the foundations for lifelong health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Timing and Critical Periods: Learn how the timing of young children’s experiences and exposures interacts with their gene expression, with implications for lifelong health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Developmental Environments: Learn how the conditions in places where children live, learn, play and grow shape their developing brains and other biological systems, with implications for lifelong health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Resilience: Discover how protective factors within a child’s developmental environment can help build essential skills to help children cope with adversity and foster lifelong wellbeing.
A Guide to Mental Health: Learn how early experiences shape the architecture of the developing brain and lay the foundations for mental health across the lifespan.
A Guide to Extreme Heat and Early Childhood Development: Learn how extreme heat can affect young children’s developing biological systems - more than most adults - with potentially lifelong impacts on their health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Water and Early Childhood Development: Explore the many ways that water shapes development - beginning before birth - including the importance of safe drinking water and the increasing impacts of extreme weather events, such as flooding.
A Guide to Individual Differences: Learn how a better understanding of individual variation in early childhood can help us design policies and programs that achieve greater impacts at scale.
A Guide to Executive Function: Executive function skills help us plan, focus attention, switch gears and juggle tasks. Learn how to enhance and develop these core skills for lifelong health and wellbeing.
A Guide to Adult Capabilities: Learn how we can build core adult capabilities - like planning, focus, flexibility and more - to effectively navigate life, work and caregiving.
A Guide to Neglect: Learn how the absence of responsive relationships can negatively impact a young child’s development and wellbeing, underscoring the importance of safe, stable developmental environments.