It was exciting to be invited earlier this week to the launch of Shaping Us, the new Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood campaign to raise awareness of how important the early years are for shaping the adults we become.
At the launch, the Princess of Wales showed her obvious passion for and commitment to improving the lives of all children, from their earliest stages of life. Her serious personal interest in the deep scientific underpinnings for why the early years matter is also very striking. We were shown a preview of the campaign video, which is now showing in cinemas around the UK. It isn’t just a warm and emotional take on one girl’s journey to age five. Every feature, beautifully depicted in clay, speaks to the detail of the developmental journey and our best scientific understanding of the myriad ways that young lives can be positively shaped by the interactions around them.
One important feature of the campaign is its life course lens. Early childhood is of course an intensely precious time in and of itself, but it is also a deeply formative time, when the interactions that we experience and the developmental pathways that we take can either help us build a firm foundation for our future lives, or can make us vulnerable in long-reaching ways.
