Whose child is it? A psychological perspective on responsibility and accountability in decision making on nurturing care in early childhood

In this comment, we examine the implications of decolonization on decision making in childcare (Kgatla, 2018). Self-empowerment as a cornerstone of change, long part of community empowerment, has finally achieved recognition within the literature on global health and nurturing care (Charani et al., 2022; Sharm & Sam-Agudu, 2023). Varied perspectives discuss the global benefits of shifting responsibility in decision making, for humanizing of the lives of the global majority and creating more sustainable change (Affun-Adegbulu & Adegbulu., 2020; de Laat et al., 2023; Martin, 2016). There still remains much more to be said, to be clarified and understood, before the imbalances and disconnect in responsibility and accountability still inherent in the current framing of child health and welfare systems are removed.

The authors of this comment, both psychologists working in the Global South, have engaged in dialogue for more than a decade, examining our individual and shared experiences of intervention, research and therapy, reflecting on our professional challenges and achievements in the field of global Early Childhood Development (ECD). These discussions have examined the complexity in the process of the decolonization of early childhood frameworks.

Within ECD those closest to the child, the parents and guardians, are held, for the most part, accountable for the failure to adequately address children's needs. However, the responsibility, the position of power, for selecting best practices is taken up by those who control the resources, the expert external to family, community and often too, external to the culture. As we observe this relationship play out, we have increasingly understood that sustainable change can only be built on a rebalancing of responsibilities, and in generating a direct connection between responsibility and accountability (Rasheed, 2021). Supporting this tangible shift in decision-making will create a more direct relationship between informed care, the context and its socio-cultural, environmental, and economic demands and the changing needs of the child (Krapels et al., 2020; Muhamedjonova et al., 2021).

The evidence in the field is predominantly informed by randomized trials conducted under controlled settings with limited generalizability (owing to the bias of being published in medical journals, as noted by Scheidecker et al., 2023). This is where we believe anthropology has a lot to offer and an excellent multi-disciplinary opportunity for incorporating their methods to understand the complexities of human nature so we avoid making simplistic assumptions of the lives of millions of children in the Global South. In this comment, we continue our process of reflective practice through which our insights have developed, sharing where our dialogue has reached in response to Scheidecker and colleagues’ (2023) critique of the field of Global ECD.