The Early Childhood Developmental Assets Framework:
- Defines holistic development by providing a comprehensive list of developmental ingredients touching all important developmental areas that are needed to raise healthy young children.
- Emphasizes thriving and strengths by supporting the positive and optimal growth of young children and enabling everybody involved with young children to recognize their role and responsibility in fostering developmental well-being.
- Promotes resilience by highlighting the qualities and features that help make young children resilient even when they encounter situations that put them developmentally at risk.
- Addresses the total environment of the child by offering a set of ideas around which parents, neighbors, and communities can positively influence the health, character, and vitality of young children and their families.
- Promotes smooth transitions by encouraging the development of all the research-based attributes young children need to successfully enter primary school and learn.
- Enhances accountability by providing an extensive list of developmentally sound and empirically based elements that can guide and shape early childhood indicator activities.
- Fosters the establishment of community systems by cataloging the factors that are needed to design and implement a community infrastructure that supports the development of young children.
There is a strong empirical basis for assuming the Developmental Assets are interconnected. As a result, the presence or acquisition of any particular asset is likely to contribute to and reinforce the attainment of other Developmental Assets. Moreover, the more Developmental Assets, both external and internal, a young child possesses, the more likely he or she is on a positive developmental course.
