Associate Professor Carolin Demuth, from the Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, has joined a consortium of scholars from the field of Cultural and Developmental Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology. The consortium represents extensive research experience in early childhood development in Africa, the Middle-East, South East-Asia, and the Amazon.

The consortium convened to critically discuss the global standardization of childcare, based on the World Health Organization’s recently published recommendations for intervention programs to optimize childcare around the world.

The large body of the research represented in the consortium account for the diversity of families, childrearing and developmental pathways and lays open the inappropriateness and even negative impact that the suggested intervention programs may actually have in many parts of the Majority World. As a result, the group is working together to formulate recommendations for ECD programs based on scientific evidence from relevant research in the field.

The meeting was hosted on May 4th–6th, 2023 by the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at the Free University Berlin by Prof. Birgitt Röttger Rössler and Dr. Gabriel Scheidecker. Among the attendees were the internationally renowned scholars Elinor Ochs, Alessandro Duranti, Sarah Harkness, Charles Super, and Heidi Keller. Brady Wagoner from the Centre for Cultural Psychology at AAU, who is currently visiting the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in which the Research Center is based, also joint the meeting.