Common Indicators of Social-Emotional Well-being in Early Childhood

The social and emotional well-being of young children is an important goal for many federal, state, and private initiatives. However, the early childhood field has lacked consensus on indicators of healthy social emotional development in early childhood.

Recognizing the opportunity to identify and align measurement strategies across initiatives and organizations, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) Project LAUNCH (Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health) leadership developed a partnership with Child Trends in 2015. The goal of the partnership was to identify a set of common indicators of social-emotional well-being in early childhood (birth to age 8).

Together, Project LAUNCH and Child Trends developed a set of 130 common indicators based on: (1) scientific evidence; and (2) shared use across a number of national initiatives. These Common Indicators reflect an ecological perspective in which child development is understood to be the product of complex transactions between children and their environments.

The Social-Ecological Model: A Framework for Prevention

Source: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Division of Violence Prevention (2018)

Piloting the Common Indicators

Project LAUNCH Expansion Grantees are currently piloting a subset of these 130 indicators.  Our vision is that other initiatives will consider adopting some of these indicators as well, with the ultimate goal of:

1. Facilitating a shared approach to measuring social-emotional well-being in early childhood;
2. Reducing burden on families, communities, and grantees by eliminating redundancies in reporting across initiatives; and
3. Providing a mechanism for assessing collective impact (i.e., the commitment of a group to solving a social problem through a shared agenda, measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, and continuous communication).