Beyond Child Survival: Positioning Parent–Child Relational Health as a Global Health Priority in the Global South
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35898/ghmj-931364Keywords:
Early childhood, Global health, Parent–child relational health, Nurturing care, Health equityAbstract
Background: Global child-health policy increasingly incorporates responsive caregiving alongside survival, nutrition, and disease prevention. However, parent–child relational health has received limited explicit attention as a health-management concern, particularly in Global South settings where household, community, and service-system conditions shape caregiving.
Perspective: This article argues that parent–child relational health should be analysed as a pathway through which structural conditions influence early-childhood health and development. Locating relational outcomes primarily within parental behaviour can misclassify constraints arising from material insecurity, and caregiving arrangements as parenting deficits.
Framework: By synthesizing evidence and conceptual perspectives on child health, caregiving, relational processes, and structural conditions, this article developed the Global South Relational Health Framework (GSRHF) as its central conceptual contribution. The GSRHF comprises six connected domains: (1) structural conditions, (2) caregiving ecology, (3) parent–child relational processes, (4) early-childhood health and development, (5) lifelong health, and (6) population health equity. The framework specifies caregiving ecology as the link between upstream structural conditions and parent-child relational processes, thereby explaining how social, material, household, community, and service-system conditions may shape relational health and subsequent developmental outcomes. The framework also incorporates feedback across domains, allowing early relational and developmental experiences to influence later health trajectories.
Implications: The GSRHF is a testable framework which could be used to explore how the structural conditions and caregiving ecology affect parent-child relational processes, and whether this affects early-childhood and later health outcomes directly or indirectly via mediation and moderation across the proposed pathways, and to compare implementation through routine services with stand-alone parenting programmes.
Conclusion: The GSRHF provides a testable structure for determining when relational constraints require caregiver-level, health-service, or structural intervention, rather than treating parent–child relational health solely as a parenting responsibility.
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