Building Equitable Societies

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course focuses on the intersection of children’s rights and needs addressing contemporary challenges of our times. The course examines the origin and effect of health, education, and social policies on children and families for issues such as pregnancy and reproductive health, and the impact of the opioid crisis, immigration and child separation and effects of incarceration. How can we use science to move the needle on these significant challenges to child development? How do systems of care and control (e.g. justice and welfare systems) intersect and how do inequities multiply to impact child development? What are the short and long term effect of separating children from their parents at the border? How do we intervene in the opioid crisis to protect young children? Answers to these questions and others like them lie at the intersection of legal policy, both international and domestic, and developmental psychology. This course introduces students to these complex and interacting influences on children’s growth and development, their biopsychosocial origins, and their inequitable outcomes. Moving from research to practice to policy provides the structure for the course. Along with scholarly readings and case studies, students will have first-hand experiences in an immigration court hearing and a newborn intensive care unit. A culminating project will require students to synthesize their learning around rights, needs, and child development.