Childhood health is associated with a wide variety of outcomes throughout the life course, from ongoing physical and mental health to disability, mortality, and socioeconomic status. Families bear the primary responsibility for making direct investments in children, as well as for regulating and allotting other public and private investments. That is, families provide the caregiving context in which most children grow and develop; they also provide and allocate resources to children. In this way, families play the primary role in promoting child health and development. Thus, any effort to promote child health must necessarily involve families. Yet the quality of the family environments in which children are raised varies considerably; in particular, not all families provide safe, stable, and high-quality care.
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Berger et al. (2015) studied this question.